I have been following the thread on cutting music rolls with some
interest.  Laser cutting would be great, I guess, but Robbie Rhodes
put it very well in 020426 MMDigest when he said that no matter
what method you use to get the holes in the paper, everything else
associated with the process is extremely time consuming.

It is a rare occasion when I meet someone interested in automatic
musical instruments who does not say he would like to produce music
rolls.  For years I put myself in that same classification.  Building
a John Smith organ and punching rolls by hand started the ball rolling
toward that goal.  Having designed and produced a complete player
piano, strung back and all, from scratch, I knew some of the obstacles
to be overcome, however, that project was years ago and I had forgotten
a lot of what I learned.

If you are going to build a perforator and live in a non-manufacturing
town as I do, then be prepared to do most of the machine work yourself.
If you do have machine shops that will even talk to you, be prepared to
pay through the nose for machine work.  It is expensive.   There will
be countless long-distance telephone calls to find supplies, order
materials, and receive aid and comfort from those that have been though
what you are experiencing.  The roll punching fraternity is a small
one.

I was fortunate in that I copied Richard Tonnesen's excellent
perforator design.  After all, it has been running successfully for
years.  One fact that I had not considered was the difference in the
size of the hole to be punched in the paper.  As it turns out, punching
a 4 mm hole in paper brings in a whole new set of rules than if I was
punching the size hole that Richard and Janet use.  Fortunately that
factor was resolved fairly easily.

Another plus was using the excellent PD1 perforator controller board
designed by the late Laurent Corey and now sold by Ron Perry of
MIDIator Systems.  Add to that the excellent software suite by Wayne
Stahnke for use with the PD1 circuit board, and 50% of the problem of
producing rolls was solved quite easily.

Economically, be prepared to invest in a lot of materials that will
sit around for a long period of time.  When I had a printing plant,
my accountant always used the total number of square feet in the
building as a guideline.  If we paid a certain amount of rent based
on the square footage, then each square foot, ideally, had to pay for
itself.

It was a rather simple rule, but it worked.  Storage of a large amount
of supply inventory cost money in the amount of square feet it took to
warehouse it.  If a machine sat idle for months, the space it occupied
was not paying its way.  Neither was the amount of money we had invested
in the machine!  The same formula can be applied to perforators, paper,
cores, boxes and anything else it takes to produce a finished music
roll.

The 20-note perforating machine has a fairly small "footprint", however
the inventory of rolls takes up a lot of space as do the rolls of paper,
the cores, and even the plastic spool ends.  My perforator produces
four to five good copies every production run.  I sell one roll and
store four, hoping that someone will buy them.  Four copies of a number
of selections have been gathering dust now for about eight months!
Those rolls are not paying their way.

Most suppliers do not want to sell small quantities of anything.  As an
example, the company that makes cores for my rolls charges me the same
price for 500 cores as they do for 1,000!  They have a minimum charge.
Sounds like a bargain?  Probably, but 1,000 cores takes twice as much
space to store as does 500.  The same goes for boxes.  Fortunately the
paper mill that manufactures the dry wax paper agreed to store half of
my order for me until I needed it.  I simply had no proper place to
store that much paper at one time.  I paid freight twice, but that was
better than renting a self-storage unit for the paper, which would have
added to its cost.

Yes, my perforator pretty much runs better when I leave it alone, in
the dark.  Richard Tonnesen told me that, but I used to sit there and
watch it from the beginning of a roll to the end.  It usually "acted
up" very close to the end of a 120 foot roll!  Now it runs by itself
in the dark and I rarely have problems with it.  Murphy's Law comes
in here, but I am just not sure where.

Marketing rolls takes time.  Editing rolls takes even more time,
although I am fortunate in the respect that I use Melvyn Wright's
arrangements and with very few exceptions (conversion glitches) the
files I purchase from him are perfect in every respect.  I only run
them through the roll editor to make sure I don't end of with a lot
of perforated paper going into the trash.

I do custom perforating of arrangements others have made for the
20-note organ.  Some of the arrangements take hours to edit so they
sound good on the organ.  This is not the arranger's fault, it is the
nature of arranging in MIDI format and then converting the MIDI file
to a format that the computer and the controller board "understand".

A perforator has to be maintained -- that in itself is time consuming
and costs money.  Down-time means the machine is not paying for itself
and I am spending time that could be used elsewhere.  Parts wear out
and have to be replaced (more time in the machine shop), and errors in
the perforating process produce a lot of wasted paper.  When I was
purchasing rolls years ago from Ray Siou, I noticed that all the
nickelodeon rolls came with perforated paper stuffed inside the boxes
to prevent damage in shipment.  I now know where all of those partial
rolls came from.  I throw mine out!

I have not mentioned the amount of paperwork involved with inventory,
shipping, billing and simply processing orders.  All of my roll inventory
is stored spooled on a core -- no label, no end tab.  _If and when_
I get an order for that particular title, then I do the finished work
of trimming, tabbing and labeling.  Before I was able to buy a large
quantity of dry wax paper, I perforated rolls on a green paper called
"Evergreen Kraft".  I no longer use that paper, but some customers got
used to it and still want their music on that paper.  In some cases
I have a double inventory labeled "green" and "white".  I am gradually
phasing that out.

There have been recent postings about a company that has not been
answering inquiries, has not delivered rolls on time, etc.  Whenever
I read one of those posts, I could not help but think of my own
problems in keeping up with the day-to-day business of producing rolls
for an instrument that is gaining in popularity.  There are, however,
far fewer Smith, Castlewood and Flora organs out there than Ampico,
Duo-Art, Welte and 88-note player pianos.  Is the market saturated?
I don't know, but obviously some people still want perforated paper.
The Tonnesens are no longer taking in any new customers.  They have all
the work they can reasonably handle.  That says something.

Is all of it worth the time, money and trouble?  For me, yes.  There is
still the fascination and satisfaction of watching a strip of plain dry
wax paper entering a machine and coming out capable of making music.
That makes it all worth while.

If you are considering entering the world of roll punching, keep your
day job and have a "stash" of money that you can afford to invest in
something that _may_ eventually give you a return on your initial
investment.

Ed Gaida - Winding down from San Antonio's annual Fiesta --
a sane version of Mardi Gras
http://www.txdirect.net/~egaida/