• Restoring rusty accordion reeds

    From Gaines Milligan@21:1/5 to All on Sun Sep 19 13:47:09 2021
    When tuning and restoring reeds often there will be some rust on them If
    it is only a few reeds with small amounts of rust, it can be scraped off
    and treated with a thin film of oil. However if there are a lot of reeds
    with significant rust, making the accordion go badly out of tune, the
    rust areas can be polished away using a bamboo skewer dipped in oil and
    fine abrasive in a rotary tool at low speed.
    This can especially be worthwhile if the reeds are very high quality of
    the sort no longer easily found. When removing rust one should be
    careful not to score the reed plate, as the edge of the slot needs to be precisely made to create the necessary turbulence for immediate reed
    response. A shim is put under the reed when cleaning the upper side to
    protect the edge of the aperture. To work on the blued area the reed can
    be lifted from the other side.
    I'm not saying you should try this yourself. as there is a lot more to
    know than I have put in this short post.
    One should never use harsh rust-removing chemicals on the reeds, like
    Naval Jelly, as this will totally ruin them. It will take off all the
    bluing and the reeds will go up in pitch, and also ruin the reed plate
    and degrade the response of the reed.

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