Hi Digest,  The subject has passed probably about a thousand of times,
but I'll post about it again.

Stripped screw holes -- I have a lot of them in the Hupfeld Phonola
I'm 'restoring'.  ('Making it play again' is a better description.)
I know the stripped screw holes should actually be drilled out and
have a new piece of wood inserted and then a new screw hole drilled.
Inserting pieces of matches is an idea that is criticised a lot of
times.  I've come up with something in the same style but yet
different.

I was cutting new leather gaskets for all the small tubing linkages in
the Phonola and hadn't cut straight on some of them, so I had a small
strip that still had to be cut off.  I still had to find a solution for
the screw holes.  Then I came up with the wild idea of inserting such a
strip of leather in a screw hole, not expecting it to work.

I found out it works just great -- I can tighten the screw just as
tight as in a new screw hole.  So it works for now; of course, I can't
say what it does in the future.  Probably the leather is cut into
various small pieces by the screw thread, but it holds.  It's certainly
not the best solution, but definitely an easy one.  It is holding for
about a week now; when it fails I'll tell you, but I don't expect that
to be soon.  (One can always make a new screw hole in that case.)

Regards,
Niels Berkers
The Netherlands

P.S.: It feels great to have 'invented' something, so don't be too harsh
on me about this.  ;-)