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Since no one else has taken this up, here’s my thoughts:
Levers should not wear strings quickly, period. Silkgut is a monofilament, and should be very wear resistant. The most common cause is rough spots in the casting or placement of the bridge pin height wrong for the lever mechanism.
A new harp should be IN regulation–meaning all the levers should raise a half step. My tolerance for proper regulation is within a few cents at most.
Silkgut is _not_ carbon fiber (fluorocarbon). If you replaced a silkgut with fluorocarbon, you may have caused that issue. Strings bumping off the bridge pin groove (assuming the pin placement and string angle are correct, which should not be an issue on a production-line harp) is caused by wrong string or lever mounting/regulation or bridge pin adjustment.
Short answer: you have another warranty issue, and need to bring it to the attention of the dealer and Salvi asap. Shipping two warranty issue harps in rapid succession does not speak well for their quality control.
Thanks for the video. Regarding the soundboard, the screws don’t hold it on–the glue does. And glue won’t stick to the putty. You will also need strips to cover the soundboard.
That soundboard will never hold the tension. My 29 string lever harp has a board with more plies. I’m not looking at it in person, but it looks to me like plain fir plywood with veneer on top–or perhaps n a shop glued up laminate with the metal laminated at the same time. In any case, it is thinner overall than the original board, and additionally only the cross grain portions of the laminate are providing any significant strength at all to the it.
If your plan is to sell for a little profit, forget it. That harp in perfect used condition sells for $7k roughly. With a blown soundboard and a damaged body, it is a parts harp, valuable only to someone with an identical harp who has a broken neck or needs an action.
That you have “restored” it makes no difference in the value–it is still a parts harp. Basically no one will buy it, if you even get it put together and get strings on it. It won’t have a warranty. You won’t have the action regulated after the board is installed. Nothing will be standard L&H. That’s just the way the harp market works. Any damaged harp, even repaired by a known professional harp shop using original equipment and techniques, sells at a discount below the regular used price. There is not likely enough margin in a small harp for even a professional shop to recover their parts and labor costs.
Think of it as a car with a salvage title. No matter what it looks like, few people will touch it. And that doesn’t even deal with the risk of its turning up on a stolen property list somewhere.
Now, doing as Balfour mentions and turning it into a light tension harp with pedals is intriguing. But using lever gut won’t save you much money on strings, and you will lose any savings in having to calculate and have custom bass strings made for the lighter tension. (And I don’t think that soundboard would even hold lever gut tension–it is only five notes lighter gauge, if I recall correctly.) That’s a fun project–but it won’t be any easier to sell and recoup your money.
Balfour, you’re not ignorant. I subscribe to new posts by email. I see that OP had greatly edited his post, after I answered, eliminating three long paragraphs.
The original post detailed how his son runs a music store, and someone brought the harp in to sell, and after they never came back to pick it up. The harp had a blown soundboard. He rebuilt the body where someone previously had cut a large vertical section out of the back, he presumed to reach the inside with a utility knife to cut the soundboard out. And the soundboard had been badly partly replaced with plywood. There was never any mention of any strings on the harp.
He detailed how he had, at great trouble, repaired the back of the “sound box” then finished it satin black. He said it looked pretty good, and he was now going to do the soundboard. He said it would never be a great harp, but it would play. He had called L&H, and no one could help him beyond the date of production, and now their phone is not answered–just goes to voicemail after 10 rings.
That’s a lot different from the current top post–and I have condensed and summarized the what the original had.
I was hoping that some understanding of harp structure might help OP think it through, and understand the stresses involved before he was further into a, let’s say, “challenging” project.
So I took a shot at an answer, frankly hoping that Biagio or Carl might pop up and authoritatively correct or confirm what I said.
Deleting the original post really makes my answer look silly. If I can find a copy of it, I’ll quote the original in a post, but I think I have deleted the email.
I’ll go out on a limb a bit–since I’m not a _pedal_ harp builder. I don’t expect you will be able to find a template–or at least one that you can use in the normal way you use a template.
Am hoping one of the pedal builders on here will correct me, but I would have thought you would taper and plane the slightly oversize soundboard (it is importantly _not_ a uniform thickness either horizontally or vertically), glue, clamp, and screw it in place, then lay out the string locations so they come exactly over the center of the natural and sharp discs, being careful that the nuts are centered in their slots first. Then the neck and column come back off and the holes are drilled through the soundboard.
I can’t see a way you could do it accurately enough otherwise and end up with a harp you can regulate–at least in a rebuilding shop setting.
I do have to ask, though: when you said that a large part of the body was cut out, I’m trying to picture what anyone was hoping to achieve.
If the structural integrity of the body was compromised at all, especially the internal butterfly braces, you will never get a soundboard to stay in the harp. The body and all its braces have to be intact to withstand the pulling force against the soundboard. The board pulls up, which pulls the body edges inward. If the edges move under the pressure, the board will pull up more, and rapidly the harp will self-destruct. The body is a lot more than just a box to hold the soundboard, and even in its intact state does not have an excess of strength for the job it has to do.
For many pop artists you will have to adapt piano/voice/guitar arrangements. It isn’t usually too hard to rearrange simple piano music. Or, if you work from the lead sheet you can play the chords to suit how you remember or want the arrangement to sound.
That’s another approach, for sure. To sound decent, it would require both a good tuning, and time for the tuning to stretch in and be corrected, and require that the harp have an _excellent_ regulation job. From harps I have seen, especially the latter is not very likely. Even on a well-maintained pedal harp, keys with many sharps can be a problem. If the harp tension is not too high already, one might simply retune the whole thing a half step high–but you still have the problem of stretching in and settling in tune.
To be in Db (major mode?), in addition to the Eb, Ab, and Bb you have on those strings, you must also have a Db and a Gb available. For a very few tunes in pentatonic scales (without a 4th or 7th scale degree) you might get away with substituting the enharmonic C# and F#. But it will be mind bending for you.
The short answer, is that you must retune, unless…..
If I were in that problem, I would request the other instruments to play the tune in D major. Except for accidentals in the music, this requires nothing but assuming the key signature has two sharps instead of 5 flats. The notes are all the same, it will simply sound a half step higher. On the chance that some are playing from chord symbols, they will play the chord one-half step higher and go ahead. In the case of guitar, in Db major, they are nearly certainly playing with a capo anyway, so they capo one fret higher and go. Single note or keyboard instruments just change the key signature to two sharps and play.
I don’t know anyone who ever uses a hard case for a car. Always put the harp with the non-levered side down. Always be sure nothing will fall over on it, that it won’t bounce around, and that it can’t move if you have to brake hard suddenly.
Otherwise, there is no problem.
Yes, there are lots of reasons why Audacity is NOT a good choice for you. You need to reread the information above.
Audacity is (primarily) an EDITOR (DAW, Digital Audio Workstation). It will record, certainly, but is unnecessarily complicated for that purpose and requires a laptop to run. It works on a digital sound file–but the digital file is created by the mic/sound card/A-D converter. If you send garbage in, you get garbage out.
Your problems with quality are almost certainly that laptop VOICE microphones, and VOICE sound cards, are not made for MUSIC. Instruments require a much larger frequency response range, and far more fidelity in recording. Even Audacity will NOT improve a recording made through a stock mic with a stock sound card (which supplies the A/D conversion).
No recording will EVER be better than the mic it starts with, so get the best you can afford/need. After the mic comes the A/D converter, which also needs to be good quality. The most economical choice will likely be a standalone mic/recorder combination like one of the Zoom units discussed above.
If you want a standalone mic only, you must either use (in order of increasing cost and quality): 1) a separate mic for your sound card FOR INSTRUMENTS, 2) a USB mic FOR INSTRUMENTS (freq response 30 Hz to 20KHz), 2) a standalone mic with a USB interface. Option 1 will only get some better quality–it still depends on the D/A converter in your sound card, which may or may not be sufficient.
Either option 2 or 3 will likely cost as much (near to over $200) as a Zoom recorder, but will still leave you tethered to having the laptop on and setup to record. The standalone recorder is much simpler to use and much more portable.
The lower Zoom units (H-1, H-2, H-3, and H-4 are reputed to have slightly less quality mics and pre-amps than their semi-pro models, which start with the H-4n Pro.
The answer for why most use 2-piece is that 1-piece can only be done when both the neck and column are made from laminate ply. And cutting out that large piece from a sheet of ply pretty much trashes the entire sheet.
Laminate columns also tend to warp, which is a worse problem than a joint separation. Solid wood columns are made with the grain vertical.
Necks are made with the grain horizontal, or glued and crossed if the harmonic curve is on the deep side. All pedal harp necks are laminated.
And no, a single piece is not necessarily stronger. A properly designed joint of two pieces can be stronger than the rest of the wood. Now, it is true that many, many lever builders don’t use anything like a “proper” joint, nor a proper glue for the purpose, but that is beside the point.
Proper joints for any medium tension or higher harp include splines, or reinforcing keys, or mortise and tenon, with epoxy or polyurethane glue. Regular woodworker’s glue is soft and creeps under time and tension. A butt joint with a couple of dowels is not a great joint for a picture frame, let alone a harp, yet many builders do exactly that, with woodworking glue. I can’t say how the Troub VI is constructed, however. Even properly designed joints get executed on a bad day, or have unusual environments, and occasionally fail, especially when thousands of them are built.
IMHO–Troubadours are fine, reliable instruments. Reasonably priced used, and easy to sell on later. The same could be said for L&H Prelude, or several Salvi and Camac models.
However, they are starter pedal harps, with pedal harp tension, pedal harp string spacing, and gut strings, and enough massive structure to handle the above. They weigh in over half the weight of a concert grand pedal. They are not Celtic harps, and not intended/designed for Celtic music. You can learn excellent classical harp technique on one and make good music along the way. They are not as loud as a pedal harp, typically, but louder than the Folk Harp you are playing. And I am not bashing the Troubadour. They are excellent, affordable, reliable harps–but they are not Celtic.
That is not to say you can’t play a Celtic tune on one. But if by Celtic, you mean a harp along with a Celtic band, or a traditional bright Celtic sound, a Troubadour is _not_ what you want. Celtic harps will have much lighter string tension, a much brighter sound, and usually closer string spacing to facilitate fast fingering, runs, and ornamentation. They are also likely much more money than a Troubadour.
Other lever harps (Dusty Strings, Thormahlen, Rees, et al.) are generally hybrids with concert pedal spacing, but medium tension, intended to do many things fairly well. Some have excellent presence and volume in a room.
Also, buy used, whatever you do. Especially when you don’t know yet exactly what you want, you don’t need the depreciation expense if/when you trade again. You should also have a harp technician examine any harp you want to purchase, or learn what to look and listen for yourself.
It all depends on where you think you want to go with your harp journey.
You will break gut strings constantly when humidity goes above around 70-75%. You will even break new gut strings that you just put on recently, especially if your harp is strung in gut into the 2nd octave. If the humidity stays high, a controlled room will be far less expensive than strings.
Using nylon will 1) alter the tone, especially until the nylon stretches in, 2) alter the regulation until the harp is regulated for nylon, and 3) cause more tuning, because nylon reacts even more than gut to humidity changes, though it doesn’t break.
Very dry in winter is an equally bad problem–or at least cycling between two extremes is quite damaging to the harp structure. The soundboard and/or body can easily crack from cycling extremes.
You absolutely need a room that you can control humidity and temperature. I keep within a range of 40-60% RH year round. An occasional day or two above/below won’t hurt except a broken string.
A good RH meter is one of the best investments you can make.
One other point to add. Wrong gauge strings may change sound or damage harp, but that will not cause breaking strings.
First guess is you are having rain and high humidity?
Shane Stewart is perfectly correct: Inlaying a strong wood tie across the joint is one way to strengthen it. This can also takes the form of a double dovetail (bow-tie) look. It requires skill to cut and bed the inlay properly–but it is very strong.
I have not found it easy to work with strings only slackened. Harps I have seen have failed across the entire joint by the time they got to me, so I plan on a complete disassembly to clean up the old glue. And I usually can’t get the old joint closed up completely without clamp and caul from the opposite side. But ones I have seen were completely separated, with some cup in the neck as well. I always re-glue with epoxy, which will stick to old glue remains, and will not creep the way PVA glue does.
The mystery to me is whether L&H changed the construction on the Troubadours. It is odd to hear of a Troub VI failing, when I know of a number of Is and IIIs and IVs that are still perfect. Maybe just from the small number of samples I’ve seen.
