From: Douglas Tate Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 22:43:00 +0100 Subject: #270 Chromatic Sliders. Now This is different!
Well, now the fun has been taken out of the slider bit by everyone agreeing that we are all geniuses. and what was the original point anyway... and nobody has actually commented on the original point I made... and
Here is another original point to chew on.
I was always bothered by the spring wearing the hole in the slider, making the slider be out of position after about 6 months playing. So... a friend of mine gave me some rubies with spring size holes in them. I made a hole just big enough for the ruby and glued it in... and it came out three or four times. so... I abandoned the idea... and bent the spring to accomodate the bigger hole.... It didn't wear!!!! The spring seemed to be rolling around the larger diameter hole (about 2.5 X the normal size ) and the wear was reduced as a result.
I have since used this ideas on 'other harmonicas' with some success.
One of the mechanisms of wear on the old harmonicas was the spring getting a fine coating of rust.. and the rust acting like a file and elongating the hole. This does not seem to happen so much nowadays.
Friend of mine also cut up a hypodermic needle and inserted a tiny bit of it in the brass slider... this was effective ... he said... However... i don't give it a lot of hope.. here's why. in the early sixties, maybe a tad earlier, I was developing the mechanics and electronics of a device which you may have come across... a dot matrix printer... wasn't called that then... we had a single wire anda magnet pulsing it and shifted the wirre around the page to form the letters :) trouble was that the mechanism to pulse the wire was heavy and difficult to move... so we wanted to move the wire end.... Ingenious to the last i got some hypodermic tubing and shoved the wire doown the inside of it... it was about a foot long and was able to flex quite a distance.. We pulsed this wire at about 1000 times a second... So... started it up... and two minutes later the wire fell out of the tube.... and so did a lot of metal dust... Hypo tubing is drawn through hard metal dies and the outside is Beautifully smooth..... however... the inside is NOT smooth it is (or was ... ) cratered and like a file!!! it had neatly filed the wirre away. (we cured this by getting bigger tubing an stuffing autoclavable nylon tubing inside , and the wire down the nylon
oh yes... harp :) you may try the tubingas a spring hole wear reventer... but beware! the above could happen to you ..
