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For most musical instruments, the dealer discount is 50%. A Steinway dealer who is selling a Steinway for $100,000 bought it for $50,000! But for harps, the dealer discount is so small, usually 10% to 20%, that they simply cannot afford to discount the instrument. I’m surprised the dealer offered you a 3% discount.
The style 22 was the semi-grand version of the 23. Same decoration and gilding, but in a semi-grand size. The quality was excellent.
What a strange way to describe music! But given the example you mentioned, I think you might like the second movement of Tournier’s first Sonatine. It’s really gorgeous.
Sebastian- I agree with Charles. You should be able to just order a rod from Lyon & Healy and install it yourself. If you have my book, A Guide for Harpists, there is a chapter in there that takes you step by step through the process of installing a new rod. Just be sure that, when you get the new rod, you compare the length with the old rod. Lay the old rod, with the piece that broke off, on a table or the floor to show the full length of the original rod, and lay the new rod next to it. Better yet, measure the full length of the old rod so that, when you order a new rod, you can tell the people at Lyon & Healy the exact length of the old rod. I’ve heard stories of people ordering a rod bay name (an A rod, a B rod, etc.) and receiving something that is too short. You should also have the 4-48 die too so that, if you have to add more threads, you have a way to do it.
Why do you want to make the rod yourself? Are you someplace where it is difficult to order one from Lyon & Healy? How old is the harp? The threadings will probably be different on an older 23 than on a newer one, since the newer ones use Salvi pedals and I’m assuming Salvi rods.
The rod itself is common drill rod. It is dead soft (18 or so on a Rockwell scale). You don’t want a hard material, and certainly not stainless steel. The rod needs to be flexible. The weakest part of the rod is the threadings, and that is where they always break when they do break, on the threaded part. Are you able to re-use the old pedal coupler? In other words, were you able to get the broken part of the rod out of the coupler?
If the harp is an older instrument (20 years or more) then the threadings are probably what Lyon & Healy has used throughout their history, which is 4-48 at the top end, and either 4-48 or 5-48 at the bottom end. If your harp is newer and has a Salvi pedal assembly, then the threadings on the rod are probably Salvi threadings, and I don’t know what those are.
There’s no such thing as a combination humidifier/dehumidifier. They are two completely different machines that operate in completely different ways.
I’m sure there is a humidifier thread here someplace that explains in detail what you should buy.
I agree with you completely Bill. The home page to me seems disorganized. It reminds me of a post-it board in a laundromat, where messages are posted helter-skelter all over the place. First and foremost, on the home page, I think there should be a date on each of the news items prominently displayed. As it is now, I have to open the news item to find out when it was posted. If I click on the Israel Competition on the home page for example, it takes me to another page with 7 articles about the competition, with no date for each article next to the title. I have to click on each article and then scroll down a ways to find out when it was posted. For something like the Israel Competition, where a series of news items are going to be posted, having the date would help clarify the order in which new items appeared. I think that a date (day, month, and year) should appear along with any headline so that we know how old or how new that article is.
The real kicker is that these harps sell for $2,000 to over $5,000! They are guaranteed to ultimately fail because of the construction. What kind of bargain is that?
Biagio,
I went to the web site of this maker, and all of their harps are still constructed this way. These instruments will last for probably 7 to 10 years at most, if the buyer is lucky, before the problems I mentioned get bad. But then the instrument is done. It doesn’t have to be that way. I own several Lyon & Healy troubadours that are probably 50 years old. The columns are all somewhat warped, and the levers are outdated. But these harps can easily be revived by changing the levers to something more modern. I like the Loveland levers. And these 50 year old harps still sound and play great.
I was just asked to look at a lever harp made by a well known maker. On the surface, it is a good looking and sounding instrument, with loveland levers on all strings, nice finish, good looking wood grain. But it is now several years old and has major problems due to idiotic construction. The moron who built this, whose name is on the company, clearly had no idea what the stress on the instrument does over time, and clearly did not understand how any harp needs to be constructed.
The neck is leaning badly over towards the strings. At the column end, the neck extends all the way to the end of the column, and the column is butted up to the underside of the neck. I assumed that the column was tenoned into a mortise on the underside of the neck, which already would be a weak and lousy way of joining the column and neck. The neck should be tenoned into the column. But on closer examination, it turns out that this idiot didn’t even use a mortise and tenon to join the column and neck. He used 4 dowels!! On the treble end of the neck, there should be a kneeblock extending the full width of the top of the body. That kneeblock is what keeps a lever harp (i.e. column) upright. But this harp does not have a kneeblock. The treble end of the neck, where the kneeblock should be, is just the width of the neck and that’s it! So the neck is totally unsupported at either end. No wonder it is leaning over.
The soundboard on this instrument, which is thin plywood, is simply glued to the body, with no screws reinforcing the glued edges, and no top strips at the edges of the soundboard. The school that owns this harp also owns another one by the same maker, which is slightly smaller but exactly the same design and construction. On that one, the entire soundboard, on both sides, has ripped loose from the body, because there are no screws reinforcing the glue joint.
There are lots of lever harp makers out there, and I’m afraid that the bulk of them use construction techniques as ridiculous as this one. When they are new, these harps look and sound nice. But the way they are constructed, there is no chance of them lasting more than a few years, and the cost of trying to correct these stupid construction mistakes is prohibitive. In the end, these are throw away harps! I can’t fix all of these problems without basically re-building the whole instrument, and that would probably cost more than the original sale price. It would not have cost that much more money to construct this instrument correctly in the first place, thus avoiding all of these problems. I think that the moron constructed this instrument this way because he didn’t have the slightest clue about the effect of stress on the parts of the instrument. UGH!!!!!!
Hi guys,
I just got home from a short regulation trip. I’ll try to read all this again tomorrow morning. Charles- thank you for your highly analytical approach and organized thinking on this. I really appreciate it. I’ll read your post 4 or 5 times before I respond to it, just to make sure I understand it as well as this brain can!
I agree with you. The flat to natural distance added to the natural to sharp distance, should add up exactly to the flat to sharp distance. Let me look at all the numbers again and see where the problem is.
I think my end goal is to try to figure out what effect the tension of the discs on the string has, and how much compensation should be allowed for that. In other words, I suspect that figuring out the string lengths from the numbers I gave you, using the formulas that were discussed previously, will add up to a total string length that is longer than the actual string length on the instrument. I’m guessing that the actual string length needs to be somewhat shorter than what the math says it should be, in order to accommodate the disc tension. So if that is true, my final question would be: Can we come up with a formula for figuring out the total length of a string on a harp that will give us that shorter actual length. My concern is almost entirely with the strings that use a stationary nut, i.e., C5 to E7.
Hey Bill,
So nice to hear from you, and to get your feedback. I’ve read your post, but I’m getting ready to do a short “harp”trip tomorrow, so I don’t have time to study it. I’m also waiting for one of the other people here to send me some calculations. So I probably won’t have time to sit and digest all of this until maybe Thursday or Friday.
I do think, as you said, that the increase in tension for a gut or nylon string when the disc is engaged is going to be more than for a wire string, and therefore, the “theoretical” string length will be more off for them than for the wires. My real curiosity is to compare the theoretical, calculated string length to an actual string length that works. My guess is that all of my string lengths will be shorter than the calculations say they should be.
OK, I took some measurements from a sampling of strings on an older 23(serial number 4300. Original soundboard, not badly pulled up) I used a compass to measure the distances between flat and natural, natural and sharp, and flat and sharp (go to Amazon and look at Toolmaker’s Precision Spring Dividers Calipers Compass. That’s what I used). I took the measurements in inches, and then converted them to centimeters. I’m giving you both measurements here so you can check that I didn’t mess anything up. I measured the distance from flat to the soundboard eyelet with a piece of string and measured that on a tape measure in inches. I’m not including that measurement here. I think my measurements with the calipers are as accurate as anyone is going to get.
Here are the measurements. The first numbers are in inches, then, in parenthesis, centimeters. Also, I tuned each string in flat, then noted how it was off in natural and sharp.
C5 2 cents sharp in natural, 10 cents sharp in sharp
Flat to natural: 2.250 (5.715). Natural to sharp: 2.1875 (5.55625)
Flat to sharp: 4.4375 (11.27125).B5 2 cents sharp in natural, 3 cents sharp in sharp
Flat to natural: 2.4375 (6.19125). Natural to sharp: 2.250 (5.715).
Flat to sharp: 4.5625 (11.58875).C6 Flat to natural is OK. Natural to sharp is 5 cent sharp.
Flat to natural: 3″ (7.62). Natural to sharp: 2.7500 (6.985)
Flat to sharp: 5.7500 (14.605)B6 Flat to natural is OK. Natural to sharp is 3 cents sharp.
Flat to natural: 3.0625 (7.7785). Natural to sharp: 2.8125 (7.14375). Flat to sharp: 5.8125 (14.76375).A6 Flat to natural is 1 cent sharp. Natural to sharp is 4 cents sharp.
Flat to natural: 3.1250 (7.9375). Natural to sharp: 2.8750 (7.3925).
Flat to sharp:5.8750 (14.9225).From these measurements, I want to know what the length of the string from the stationary nut (flat position) to the soundboard eyelet should be.I’m very curious to see what the “theoretical” length of each string should be based on the mathematical formula, as opposed to what the actual string length is. Thanks!!
I took some measurements from a 23 that I have, measuring some of the wire strings the way I described above. I’ll post those measurements here probably tomorrow (I’m too tired now to deal with numbers!). I’ll be curious to see what you guys can come up with for the overall length of the string, based on the measurements I give you. I’m not going to tell you what the full length of the string is. I want to see what you come up with.
