Caboose
Newbie
Hello,
I have recently bought an old accordion for a relatively cheap price. and as one might expect, it had its fair share of problems to be addressed. Now, I have serviced some old woodwinds and a violin before with success, however I haven't so much as touched an accordion before I bought this one!
So I managed to tighten the wrist strap (the wheel is missing, so I used thin pliers to rotate the nut inside. The strap while definitely old, still seems strong to me),
readjusted a piano voice button that wouldn't stay down/active because of the spring inside was not oriented properly,
patched up the leaky bellow corner (boy did I feel the difference there!),
gave the interior a MUCH needed cleaning (it was bad...I don't know how someone could've been so careless with this accordion from how bad it was...),
and leveled the piano keys (this accordion doesn't have the side bar holding all the keys, after a bit of tinkering I found instead it has a spring for every individual key with a nifty little tool I found against the metal plate above the top row tone holes, but let me tell you re-springing every key was extremely tedious, especially the last one since I had the least amount of horizontal movement to work with since all the other keys were in place.).
So after all of that, there is still one problem, the valves. When I hold notes, or quickly switch from expanding, to contracting the bellow, I hear this sort of pop, that is most likely because of some curling going on with the valves. Now the top valves of each reed block on the piano side are surprisingly flat actually, no extreme curling in any of them, however I suppose that because of the way the accordion was stored, most of the upside down valves of the reed blocks are curling. (I found that all of the valves that are inside of the reed blocks (the ones that are used to play notes when compressing the bellow I believe) are nice and flat, even the upside down ones). So I tried curling the valves inwards to fix this, then I realized something.
This is a 2 voice accordion, the upper reeds/valves on the block are the higher (clarinet?) notes, while the upside down reeds/valves are the lower (bassoon?). So this is what confuses me, if the clarinet valves are flat, and the bassoon ones are the ones that are curling, I don't get why when I play with both voices, the clarinet is the one that pops/falters, leaving only the bassoon playing. I even tried playing a note without a clarinet valve just to see what would happen, nothing changed, even when I placed the valve back (yes this all took a lot of time and patience). So does anyone know why the notes with the flat valves are inconsistent, whilst the notes with the curling valves aren't nearly as bad? (I didn't straighten all of them yet.) Note, I couldn't see much corrosion/oxidation on the reeds, just some small spots a darker silver than the rest, but nothing I would consider even so much as cosmetically detrimental.
I also forgot to mention this only happens when expanding the bellow, not contracting; and there was no mold, or smell of cigar to be found in the accordion.
I have recently bought an old accordion for a relatively cheap price. and as one might expect, it had its fair share of problems to be addressed. Now, I have serviced some old woodwinds and a violin before with success, however I haven't so much as touched an accordion before I bought this one!
So I managed to tighten the wrist strap (the wheel is missing, so I used thin pliers to rotate the nut inside. The strap while definitely old, still seems strong to me),
readjusted a piano voice button that wouldn't stay down/active because of the spring inside was not oriented properly,
patched up the leaky bellow corner (boy did I feel the difference there!),
gave the interior a MUCH needed cleaning (it was bad...I don't know how someone could've been so careless with this accordion from how bad it was...),
and leveled the piano keys (this accordion doesn't have the side bar holding all the keys, after a bit of tinkering I found instead it has a spring for every individual key with a nifty little tool I found against the metal plate above the top row tone holes, but let me tell you re-springing every key was extremely tedious, especially the last one since I had the least amount of horizontal movement to work with since all the other keys were in place.).
So after all of that, there is still one problem, the valves. When I hold notes, or quickly switch from expanding, to contracting the bellow, I hear this sort of pop, that is most likely because of some curling going on with the valves. Now the top valves of each reed block on the piano side are surprisingly flat actually, no extreme curling in any of them, however I suppose that because of the way the accordion was stored, most of the upside down valves of the reed blocks are curling. (I found that all of the valves that are inside of the reed blocks (the ones that are used to play notes when compressing the bellow I believe) are nice and flat, even the upside down ones). So I tried curling the valves inwards to fix this, then I realized something.
This is a 2 voice accordion, the upper reeds/valves on the block are the higher (clarinet?) notes, while the upside down reeds/valves are the lower (bassoon?). So this is what confuses me, if the clarinet valves are flat, and the bassoon ones are the ones that are curling, I don't get why when I play with both voices, the clarinet is the one that pops/falters, leaving only the bassoon playing. I even tried playing a note without a clarinet valve just to see what would happen, nothing changed, even when I placed the valve back (yes this all took a lot of time and patience). So does anyone know why the notes with the flat valves are inconsistent, whilst the notes with the curling valves aren't nearly as bad? (I didn't straighten all of them yet.) Note, I couldn't see much corrosion/oxidation on the reeds, just some small spots a darker silver than the rest, but nothing I would consider even so much as cosmetically detrimental.
I also forgot to mention this only happens when expanding the bellow, not contracting; and there was no mold, or smell of cigar to be found in the accordion.
