Hi Bullrat, and welcome to the forum.
I've grown to respect accordions a lot more once I started digging inside them & appreciated the mechanical complexity. It's fun (for some of us at least), but extremely time consuming - accordions are in a completely different league of manual labour requirements compared to banjos, resonator guitars and sewing machines. A lot of my youth was spent being grilled by parents for disassembling (and attempting to assemble) everything I could get my hands on (including an almost brand new PC
back in the days when personal computers were big, heavy and very expensive. How could I resist!), so I fully understand your drive.
However, I wouldn't start form this squeezebox, unless you are extremely attached to it emotionally. It's good for taking apart to see what's inside, but I'd choose a different box to invest your time in re-assembling, waxing, tuning, re-felting, etc. Several reasons for that:
1) It's in pretty much dead condition. With accordions the starting point matters a lot, and the amount of time required to fix them grows exponentially as the starting condition gets worse.
2) Horch wouldn't have high quality voices or mechanics (especially on a "child" model like this) and will probably not have the best sound & playability even if you took it to better-than-factory condition.
3) I wouldn't start learning to play on a 2 octave instrument. They are very niche squeezeboxes with an extremely limited range, different bellows action (due to very low volume) and are typically not recommended for people to learn on.
4) I would recommend having a good box for learning and a separate box for learning how to repair them. The problem is that if the accordion set-up is only 90% good, it becomes very difficult to learn on it (an experienced player can work around the issues, but a beginner won't). And if you're learning how to repair, you won't get to 90%-good set up in your first box.
Having gone through what you're going now (I don't have much experience repairing tbh - 2 repairs, 2 complete overhauls, made my own reed blocks, recently learned to rivet my own roller bass machine mechs and, just for fun at this point in time, started learning how to make reeds from scratch with reasonable success for the first few attempts).
So my advice (if I was to start all over again) would be:
For playing, get a full-sized box in good condition with 2 voices in the right hand side, dry-tuned.
For fixing, get something more high end, so you get a very nice instrument when it's done. Or maybe even get a melodeon, as the repair skills learned will be the same, but they've got fewer parts, better spacing between them, so easier to work on, and you'll get a playable result a lot faster.
If you are not going down the melodeon route, find a high quality full-sized accordion in good condition, but in need of a full overhaul. I.e. looks brand new on the outside, but most of the insides need to be re-done. Make sure that most valves are still in reasonable condition - you'll never get a well-playing box if you have to valve the reeds from scratch!!! Such boxes do come up for very reasonable prices if you know what to look for.
Good luck and enjoy!
