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Cutting reed plate pairs apart and then what?

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I suspect this may be a nutty question, but here's the story: I have a hundred (or so) year old Czech helicon bass box, which is a basket case: Bellows shot, foundations badly warped, reed blocks damaged from some accident, action levers twisted. In short, a near-total mess that no one has shown remote interest in restoring. But the old reeds are nice, I suspect, and I am particularly curious about re-purposing the bass notes for some sort of harmonium/footbass/bass box. SO, the question: Can I fabricate replacement reed shoes for half the bass reeds (say, 6) since to cut the zinc pairs will wreck one per pair...the middle metal is too thin to cut along its length, so I need to fabricate some replacement. Or, can I solder zinc back to finish a shoe for reeds? I attach a picture FYI.

Thanks for any suggestions!
 

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Ain't you lucky there's other accordion nutters on this forum.

Yes, it's doable, but might not be worth for you, as it involves almost all of the steps to manufacture a hand-made reed. You're saving time on not having to cut & profile the tongues yourself, but you're complicating things by having the tongue's rivet hole pre-stamped.

You can make the shoes either by hand (a real pain in the arse) by chain-drilling out a piece of aluminium, then filing. Or get them cut on a laser. Cheap & cheerful, but your new shoes won't have any relief on them (reed slots need to open up towards the back of the plate to prevent the tightly-fitted tongue from clipping the walls).
It's OK, afaik, even Italians are still filing the relief by hand on a-mano reeds, and it's not a difficult job, you just need a set of safety files that can't be bought commercially, so you need to make your own on a bench grinder.

The problem for you is then to place the rivet hole in the plate in such a way that the tongue will be closely aligned with the slot.
It's a lot easier to take a reed blank, hold it in the slot and punch the rivet hole in it on a special jig, but you don't really have such luxury.
As an option, you can design the new slots slightly smaller than your reeds and then file the reeds to fit the smaller slots. After a couple attempts you should be matching TAM quality in terms of fitting gaps.

You then need to rivet the tongue onto the plate, which takes a bit of skill, but if your hands are growing out of the right place, you'll be a skilled riveter after about 4-6 hours of practice. It's not hard and you don't need a 4-year degree in it. But it really helps if you have a reedmaker who can show you the process!

If I were you I'd sell these reeds to a diatonic fettler. Should be very nice reeds.
 
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Thanks for the in-depth analysis, tcabot. I appreciate it. There is one piece of information I didn't mention, which is that the tongues are mounted to the plates via SCREWS, which gladdened my heart when I saw them; I am not that keen on learning to rivet on such nice old stuff. Maybe I should sell the reeds to a diatonic fettler, as you suggest.....
 
Riveting is one of the easiest parts to be honest. And you can buy a strip of spring steel and learn on that. It gets harder the thinner the aluminium gets. Riveting into brass is a walk in the park.
Screwing the reed into a reed plate will be a real challenge - close to impossible without CNC I'd think, unless you use undersized screws and leave a lot of wiggle room for aligning the reed. Even then screws are questionable.
Hohner had this idea of lightly riveting reeds with undersized rivets, then gluing reeds in place (with epoxy I suspect). Sounds dodgy but 70 years on they still work like a dream and don't suffer from the same issues as Italian master riveter work :unsure:

Biggest problem is just how time-consuming everything is, but nothing about making a reed is hard.
 
Can't I use the existing tapped holes and screws? That's what I imagined; do you mean that I'd need to make a new plate for every-other-one when I cut the zinc plates apart?
 
Yes, if you cut, you get one usable half and one unusable. The unusable will need new plates.
 
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