In his latest posting Matthew Caulfield mentioned a laser punching
perforator for paper-rolls.  It seems however that, unfortunately, the
owner, Donald Neilson Sr., has nobody to run this interesting machine.

Since we have ourselves conceived a laser cutting perforator system for
organ books we would like to know if there are other machines based on
laser cutting techniques in the USA or elsewhere in the world, since
the subject has not been mentioned in the MMD archives for about 10
years.

After several months of tests and improvements our apparatus is now
capable of cutting organ books for different scales, cardboard strips
for programmable pling-plong music boxes and cardboard discs for
Ariston and Herophon instruments as well as other objects and forms
made from different materials (tissue, wood, Plexiglas, etc.).
At the moment we are able to produce books for several French organ
scales, Ariston discs, and cardboard strips for 15-, 20-, 30- and
33-note pling-plong movements starting from MIDI files.

One major difficulty is the software for running the laser cutter and,
more specifically, the programs used for the transformation of MIDI
files into image formats compatible with the laser machine.  We are
very much indebted to a friend from Lyon, a software engineer, who has
developed the software allowing us to achieve this task.

Gerard Dabonot - Le Turlutain Musique Mécanique Editions musicales
Sommerviller, France
http://www.leturlutain.fr/ 
leturlutain@free.fr.geentroep [delete ".geentroep" to reply]