[ Ref. Laser Piano Roll Custom Cutting

After five months of painful struggle, resent, victory, defeat, joy,
depression, and 400 feet of ruined paper, I _finally_ got my laser
roll perforator working.

I'm currently working on getting a bunch of one-off orders out
of the way before I get onto the monstrous run of "Happy Days Are
Here Again" recuts and then after that a 14-roll order shipping to
Germany and I should be in a position to take more orders.

I'm amazed Spencer has been able to tolerate my insanity (and
inevitable stupidity) throughout this process. I'd like to thank
him for his brilliantly strong resilience against my antics and
his patience in telling me how to do something fifteen times before
I finally would do it and things would improve despite my having to
talk my way out of having to send him the machine back. (Yeah,
things got that hopeless at times, so that my only choice seemed
to be to return the perforator and admit defeat.)

Spencer, _thank you_ for your patience, your insight, and help with
this project over the last half of a year.

And, ladies and gentlemen, I think Spencer deserves a round of
applause even if imagined for being the _only_ engineer to ever
design a perforator, document it, publish designs and make it possible
for us to keep the industry alive with a humble laser and silicone
drive wheel (and 1200 feet of kraft paper). I can only imagine that
in the next decade the mechanical music world will be making a great
deal of use from the Chase perforator and the concepts embodied in
the only hobbyist-assembly feasible single-head perforator.

And also it would be a travesty not to thank Bill Luecht who has been
a huge innovator with this project and has been successfully cutting
beautiful copies of piano rolls since August I believe (possibly
earlier). His optimization software for more efficient Gcode cutting
and his documentation of the brilliant, nearly fully automated overhaul
of the drop-in design I believe will be hugely helpful to those who
want to take on the challenge and build one of these amazing machines
for themselves.

Bill's also been a great help to me and I appreciate his encouragement
for me to keep working at this project.

And now the fun stuff!

I'm going to get a catalog together of all the music I can punch --
duplicates and new rolls alike. I'll probably distribute it through
email due to my lack of a website.

I'll make a post once I've done so and have a listing of all the rolls
I can cut (and I will update it as I get new material) and if anyone
wants a copy just drop me a line at my email (especially if you're
curious about any new stuff as I probably won't be announcing new stuff
being added).

As of writing this I'm still not sure how I'm supposed to take
payment without losing 10 percent to the company processing it, so if
you ask about that in an email to me inquiring about custom cutting
I'll probably have an answer for you (which probably is going to be
something goofy like Venmo or whatever).

Anyway, that's all on my end; I've got a _lot_ of work ahead of me!

Piotr Barcz
Upstate New York