Jurgen Goering is quite right that the hobby can be quite parochial
and that innovators and top-quality producers from the wrong part of
the world (east of the Rockies, or even worse, east of the Atlantic)
get soundly ignored!

Tom Jansen produces wonderful rolls for many types of instrument and
is certainly not as well known as he should be; I ran a rather brief
article about him and his products in the Player Piano Group bulletin
in December 2001, and friends have many of his rolls.

However, as far as I am aware, his rolls are not perforation accurate.
They are very high quality analogue scans, cut to the nearest 0.1 mm
(about 1/250th of an inch).  To be perforation accurate the original
punch pattern needs to be established.  Although it is very sensible
to introduce additional strengthening bridges into some types of master,
the master has to be there first.

Other reaction to my earlier posting has been that Wayne Stahnke did
all this ten years back, which of course he did, and is the major
pioneer (but not the only one -- parochialism again).  However, until
Dave Saul started making Ampico rolls using Wayne's recreated masters,
how many were actually cut?

I've got hundreds of recut rolls and only Dave's and some hand-crafted
ones from Rex Lawson are proper replicas.  That's the real challenge of
the whole project: to get these things out into the market so that the
quality of recut rolls improves.  Not, of course, that many people
actually buy them... but that's another matter.

I wouldn't expect to be loaned rarities, although I'm often pleasantly
surprised by people's generosity and trust.  One nice thing of the new
scanners is that they can be taken round to where the rolls are.  Most
proper enthusiasts are extremely helpful when it comes to in-house
scanning, or bringing rolls with them when they visit.  Shared enthusiasm
is a major part of the fun of the hobby, and much more widespread than
private hoarding.  Once a roll has been scanned the recreated master
can be propagated -- roll cutting is hardly a competitive commercial
environment -- so it only takes one person to let a roll be copied to
make all the other closed collections irrelevant!

Julian Dyer

 [ Wayne Stahnke's transcribing goal is to recover the master roll
 [ data as it existed after the editor approved it and before the
 [ fragile roll was damaged in the perforating shop.  Copying an old
 [ production roll simply copies the errors of that specimen, so Wayne
 [ borrows and transcribes several production rolls and compares the
 [ data in order to identify and correct the random errors.  -- Robbie