Hallo Robbie,  Now let me introduce myself to MMD.

I am a physicist, and in 1994 I retired from Siemens Medical
Engineering, where I was responsible for digital image communication
and archiving in hospitals.  The acronym used worldwide for this topic
is PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems).  This job gave
me the opportunity to visit the US very often and to join nearly every
year the PACS Conference in Newport Beach, California, and to stay
quite often in the two most beautiful cities of the world: San
Francisco and Chicago; my wife, Helene, and I both love these cities
and the many beautiful places we could visit in the US !

Now that I'm retired I can concentrate on restoring the articles which
I collected from all over the world during my active business time.
The collection is just now somewhat more than 300 items, and consists
primarily of four parts:

1.  Historical woodwind instruments: Renaissance, Baroque, 19th and
20th century.

2.  Automatic Wind Instruments: e.g. several Serinettes, Perroquette,
French Salon Orgue; some Ariston's, Aristonette, Diana, Intona,
Phoenix, Mignon, German Leierkasten, Floetenwerke; and some very
special non-automatic wind instruments called Reiseharmonium (i.e.,
a very small and lightweight reed organ to take along when traveling).

3.  Other mechanical musical instruments: Cylinder boxes, disc boxes
(Symphonion, Polyphon, Kalliope, Orphenion).

4.  Clocks equipped with and without mechanical musical instruments
(18th, 19th and 20th century).

When I was still with Siemens I concentrated on collecting, and
during those years I improved my skills as well as the equipment in
my workshop.  Now I am concentrating more on restoring; I feel quite
comfortable in working on the clock-maker's lathe, on the milling
machine, in galvanic techniques and, of course, in all the wood
working.

So you see, it is a wide area and there are always open questions:
What period is a certain object from?  Who was the maker?  How to
reconstruct the scale and tuning of an old instrument?  How to work
on a rare but badly damaged part?  Where to get a spare part or some
crazy material?  (E.g., the valves in the Mignon Organette are made
from leather of the intestines of fish, and you can get this leather
in Germany).

When I was browsing through the MMD Archive I became more and more
convinced that this is a good place to share experiences and to get
answers on both simple and difficult questions.

Now you might have some feeling about what I am interested in.  I am
looking forward to hearing more from MMD.

Christian Greinacher
Roettenbach, Germany

 [ Wilkommen an MMD, Christian !  Among our subscribers are many
 [ retired professionals who, like you, now have the time to create
 [ and restore instruments in their workshops.  Jody and I are proud
 [ of the exchange of knowledge within MMD -- letters from the
 [ scientists to the restorers, and from the music-box tuners to
 [ physicists -- all imbued with respect for the traditional art
 [ and love of the music.  I think you'll enjoy our Digest!
 [ -- Robbie