Pneumatic Cloth Life
By Don Teach
In response to why rubber cloth just does not last as long, I believe the answer lies in an old Player Piano Co. catalog. They do not use as much natural rubber verses synthetic materials. Anybody remember how long those rubber bands that your newspaper came with used to last. I still remember throwing those papers with those bands 30 plus years ago and they were made by Plymouth rubber company, the same company that made cloth for player pianos. Now those rubber bands last maybe a month.
Several years ago a group of restorers knew the failing quality of our current suppliers. The search was on. I think it was Jeffrey Morgan who did quite a bit of the work stateside. A supplier was found in Australia and the rubber was put through extensive chemical test. I used to have all the data and lost it somewhere.
Player Piano Co. and Schaff now sell this cloth. I would guess that some of the older cloth could still be on the shelf and sold but probably not as nobody had cloth of any kind several years ago. I would also think that since the player piano industry is so small that it would be really expensive to find someone willing to make pure rubber cloth again.
It is kind of like trying to find radio tubes. That market is so small there are no American manufacturers making tubes today. There is hope on the horizon for people that need tubes though as a new company is starting to make them in America. If we could interest more people in the world to own a pneumatic player piano then we too could have hope.
Perhaps a watchdog for the Player Piano Co. could interview Durrell Armstrong for his opinions.
By the way, I am still looking for nickelodeon pianos.
Don Teach
1610 E. Bert Kouns
Shreveport, LA 71105
dat-smc@juno.com |
(Message sent Mon 3 Feb 1997, 15:52:05 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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