Bluestar reeds

[Ventura]

I actually inquired with VA about becoming a dealer in North America but I’d have to be doing some serious business and ordering a large number of reeds annually for that to work. I repair and rebuild accordions but don’t build, so it doesn’t make sense for me to do that at the moment.

interesting

on one hand, obviously Petosa has a direct relationship with VA,
so for them NOT to be a "dealer" jobber of the reeds themselves
says something.. they are certainly the main proponent of BlueStar

are they selling so few accordions with BlueStar that they are not
even close to the per-year volume needed for a full VA dealership ?

just considering the inquiries here from people in the market for reeds
and that someone in North America providing them would instantly have
the equivalent of a continent-wide "yellow pages" worth of free advertizing..
well, you would obviously soon be the go-to guy and at the least have a shot
at everyone that WAS in the market

but that might not be enough, sadly.. though if you offered all the commonly needed
tools and materials for reedwork as well and invested in a solid but simple
website ordering platform it might be worth it/profitable

since VA protects it's authorized dealers/network if you agreed to give
Petosa "dealer pricing forever" in return for them to purchase exclusively through
you then the yearly volume you would need might be within reach ?
the carrot for Petosa would be that they could lighten their in house inventory
costs as you would be able to provide more or less "just in time" style
inventory management to them

 

[SteveBox]

if the edge all the way around the reed is blue, then
howinnahell did they "re-temper" the steel without
screwing up the hold of the rivet or the aluminum reedplate ?

because once the reed was punched out/cut from the sheet
of steel, it would not be blue along the sides/edges

I don't know how they are made, but I would guess they have a way of doing the initial rough tuning before riveting the reeds to the plates. For a given reed size and pitch, they must have learned how to precisely remove just the right amount of material from the reed tongues so they come out almost in-tune after the re-temper and plate riveting. This is probably something that would only be possible with modern technology.