Tom Lear reports investigating a simple paper punch for home use in
making single copies of music rolls, and coming up with the Leabarjan
frame punch as a possibility or Robert Streicher's (the Pond Eddy,
N.Y., machinist; phone 570-559-7403) hole punch. Douglas Henderson
is the Leabarjan expert here, so I won't comment on that, except
to say that the company is long out of business.
As far as I know Robert Streicher's punch is a simple hand-held punch,
very useful for editing an existing music roll or, with infinite
patience and painstaking care, for punching out a whole tune by hand.
I have done the latter many times myself, using a Streicher punch, and
the results are quite satisfactory. So far the punch I bought years
ago for $21 is still giving good service, needing only an occasional
touch-up of its edge on a piece of the finest grade emery cloth.
I heard that Mr. Streicher is no longer making them though, but that
may be mis-information.
There are two reasons, I think, for the 10-copy minimum Tom complains
of. The economic reason is that it takes almost as much time and
machine wear to make multiples as it does to make a single copy. The
more compelling reason though is practical: a production perforator
doesn't punch cleanly with less than a certain minimum number of paper
layers to punch through.
Matthew Caulfield
[ Also, the labor and shipping costs for one original roll and
[ one copy is hardly any less than for ten copies. -- Robbie
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