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I heard Leonard Slatkin tell this joke:
A man walks into a butcher shop and looks over the meat in the case. He sees a platter of meat and a sign that says ‘Calves brains- $2 per pound.’ Next to it is another platter with the sign ‘Conductors brains-$200 a pound.’ Mystified, he ask the clerk why the conductor’s brains are so much more expensive. ” Do you know how many conductors it takes to get 1 pound of brains?”
Sidney- I just took a look at your photos. I don’t think you have a rivet problem. The pedal fulcrum is screwed into that brass plate, and it sounds like the fit between the fulcrum threads and the threaded hole in the plate is a little sloppy. So the fulcrum is moving around a little when you move the pedal(which it is not supposed to do). But I don’t think it is going to fail on you. The rivet I was talking about hold the pedal bar and the fulcrum together, not the fulcrum and the base plate.
Saul- Any company can make some change to their construction with the very best of intentions and have it blow up in their faces. i do not fault any company for mistakes that are made in the honest attempt to improve the instrument. Time is the acid test, and changes to the construction or assembly that made perfect sense initially can be disastrous in the long haul.
The problems arise when a company fails to recognize when a mistake has been made, or recognizes it and chooses to do nothing to correct it. I think that the problem I mentioned at the start of this thread was done primarily to cut cost, and didn’t appear initially to have any problems with it. Time has proved otherwise. So now it’s time for said company to 1)change the assembly procedure for this item so it never happens again, and 2) to fix the problem, at no cost to the owners of these instrument, and to do it immediately to all of the instruments already out in the field(like an auto recall) and not wait for a panicked call from a frantic harpist. My guess is that said company will do neither.
Sidney- It sounds like the start of the same problem, and if it is, you need to get it fixed immediately. Start by taking the pedestal off and looking at the fulcrum as you move that pedal around. See also if the rivet looks like it is coming out. If it is, then you have to deal with it.
As an emergency repair, you can replace the rivet with a small bolt and nut, or a nail bent over to keep it in place. Whatever you use, try to find a size that comes as close as possible to the diameter of the rivet(in other words, filling the hole as much as possible). That way, you’ll get minimal noise when you use it. It won’t work right until you get it fixed properly, but at least it will work.
BTW, the problem that I described is in fact in the Salvi pedal bars, and the MAJOR COMPANY I mentioned uses Salvi pedal assemblies in all of their instruments.
When I was living in France ions ago, I lived with a French family for a while and both the husband and wife were professional musicians. My French was awful at the time, and one day the wife was telling me about the gig she had played the night before and the awful conductor. She said that he kept screaming at the orchestra “Regardez la bagette!! Regardez la bagette!!!” I knew the word bagette as a long thin loaf of French bread, and only realized then that bagette really meant ‘stick.’ But I had this image in my head of a conductor standing in front of the orchestra conducting with a loaf of French bread. I still get that image when I think of that story.
The Ford pinto gas tank fiasco is the one that I remember. When that went to trial, it came out that 1)Ford knew that the gas tanks could explode in a rear end collision and probably kill everybody in the car, and that 2)after doing a cost analysis, Ford decided it was cheaper to let people get killed and pay the law suits that would result than to fix the problem. That is why the jury awarded what was at the time a stupefying amount of money to the plaintiffs in the case, in effect saying, the damages Ford has to pay have to be much more than the cost of fixing the problem. It was a landmark case and showed the callousness that business is capable of. Unfortunately(in a way), in the harp world, there are no bodily injuries associated with badly constructed harps. So we don’t have the same leverage. But by making the problem public, maybe harpists can exert pressure on the company to mend their ways.
A regulator you all know told me the following joke this past weekend.
The phone rings in the front office of a symphony orchestra and the receptionist picks it up. The voice on the other end says “May I please speak to the conductor?” “I’m sorry” she says, but the conductor died this past week.” The caller hangs up.
Five minutes later the phone rings again. “May I please speak to the conductor?” the caller again asks. “Sir, I’m sorry, but the conductor died this past week.” The caller again hangs up.
Five minutes later the phone rings again. “May I please speak to the conductor?” “Sir, i’ve told you twice now that the conductor died last week.”
“I know,” the caller says. “I just get so much pleasure hearing you say it.”
I would like to add one last thing. I did not make the above post to simply snipe at another harp company. I don’t bad mouth anybody for the sake of finding fault. I did it to issue a warning to those who may own one of these instruments or are thinking of buying one. They need to know that there are consistent problems cropping up that technicians are having to deal with. If you have your harp regulated from time to time by a harp technician, ask him/her to look at the rivets that hold the pedal bar and pedal bar fulcrum together to see if there is any sign that a rivet is coming out. If any of these 7 rivets are rotating when the pedal is moved, or is sticking out on one side, then it is loose and needs to be replaced. You need to ask the technician to look for this because he/she would not be expecting something like this and would not see it unless looking specifically for it.
I spoke to my good friend Bill Grant about the harp on the boat. Bill is the resident harp technician in New York City. When the boat comes into New York harbor next week, he’s going to have to get on it with a small anvil and riveting hammer and change all of the rivets on the pedal bars on this harp. And he only has about 6 hours to do it before the boat pulls out again. He has a bag of replacement rivets supplied to him by the MAJOR COMPANY. They are fully aware of the problem but so far I’m not aware that they have fixed it. There’s a fundamental rule of business that goes: If your product has a flaw or problem, but it is not hurting sales or causing you to loose business, then don’t spend the time or money to fix it. Just keep selling it as it is.
I wasn’t expressing an opinion. I was telling you how things have gone seriously wrong with a certain company. That’s not opinion. That’s fact. If you think you know the company I’m talking about then that’s fine. But I’m not about to set myself up for a lawsuit.
This problem comes up so often that I think all harpists should include a “TRANSCRIPTION FEE” in their rates when a situation like this comes up. The composer of course will look at you like you have two heads and ask why a transcription fee. It was after all written for the harp. Your answer is that it was not written for the harp. It was written for a keyboard instrument, and you have to transcribe it for harp and therefore the fee of say $25 per hour of labor.
David- This jerk wrote this on an electronic keyboard with a “harp” button on it. So tell him to perform the piece on the same instrument. That’s what it was written for!
The number stamped on the wood parts of the instrument was to identify all of the parts for one instrument during the manufacturing process. The action was the last thing fitted to the instrument and it had a different serial number. For both Lyon & Healy through most of the 20th century and Wurlitzer, the body number and the action number were usually close but not the same.
An Orchestral Grand ought to be a 47 string instrument. C on the bottom to G on top. I own two, one of which has a straight soundboard and the other(pictured on my web site, http://www.swansonharp.com) an extended board. The extended board harp has discs on the top G, while the straight board version does not.
The Wurlitzer serial numbers have been lost, which is a tragedy. Without that list, we don’t know when each of the harps was built. But we also don’t know how many harps they made each year, what their total output was, and how many of each model was made.
Your serial number of 747 is on the low end. The lowest numbers I have seen are in the 700 range, and the highest around 1200. So yours was probably built around 1910 to 1912.
There was a mechanical technician at the Wurlitzer factory for much of its history who apparently was responsible for assembling the actions and also for action repairs. His name was Emil Holub, and he very frequently signed his name to the back side of the front action plate. Occasionally he also put a date. It’s a tragedy that he didn’t date them each time he signed his name. The funniest signing of his name that I saw said: Emil Holub, action man.
