REPAIRING THE CONCERTINA (almost)

In our harp circle, we thought it might be nice to have some sort of alternative sounds against all those harps, so I decided maybe I could add some easy chords with the concertina. 

I got the concertina out -- I've had it for about 30 years or so, John got it for me for Christmas the year we went to Mystic Seaport the first time and where a guy was playing it on the pier and I thought, "I could do that." 

As it turned out, I wasn't really very good at it.  I could play the chords, but it kind of escaped me about playing a melody with the chords.  On the other hand, I did get so I could do a passable version of Waltzing Matilda. 

But as time went by, the concertina got kind of sad sounding, and I didn't play it much.  Then about five or six years ago, we went to Cotati to see the accordion festival, and I realized that it was pretty easy to fix the buttons, and came home and fixed a few of them. 

So when I got it out,  I thought it would be pretty playable, but no, the buttons I didn't fix back then had now disintegrated.  So I took the thing apart and replaced the rest of the little sleeves. 

Each button has a little sleeve of rubber material aound it, (the black stuff in the picture) which holds the key up when it isn't engaged, and when the key is up, the hole is covered, meaning no air can get through, meaning there is no sound.  I found that the tubing that people use for oxygen was the right size, as long as you could cut it into pieces about a half inch long. 

Melva had given me some of this tubing, and I usually use it to make peyote stitch bead tubes.  So after I spent a couple of hours hunting for this tubing I started the project.  First you have to take the concertina apart, then you have to do whatever fixing you're going to do, then you have to put it back together again, because you can't tell whether you've fixed it unless you do that.  So there's a lot of taking it apart and putting it back together again.  I had a cutting tool but it seemed like I could actually cut the tubing better with the scissors. 

Once I got the melody buttons fixed, I discovered that some of the bass keys had kind of collapsed, so I took that side apart and just replaced all the little pieces of tubing, put it back together and even though all the keys were standing up, and the holes were apparently covered, it plays constantly, whether you press the buttons or not. 

 

I'm uploading a little video of how horrible it sounds now. All the notes are playing all the time, as if all the holes are open, which perhaps they are.  And my ADHD is such that I don't want to putz around with it anymore, I'm ready to move on to wrecking something else.  Maybe tomorrow at Tara.