Dave Krall asks about availability of the fine-mesh brass screen
that Wurlitzer used between the tracker bar and the backing board to
catch paper dust from the roll paper.  When Seabreeze Park got its
new Verbeeck replica 165  band organ in 1966, it had Wurlitzer brass
screens on the roll frame, but due to the nature of the leather
gasketing material Johnny Verbeeck used, it was difficult to make
a tight seal between the two halves of the tracker bar system.

At that time I was working at the Library of Congress (LC) in Washington,
D. C., and we had a stash of old, unused computer glare screens made of
some kind of black nylon(?) in a finely woven mesh.  I sent some of
that mesh to Seabreeze, which found that the fabric worked perfectly as
a tracker bar filtering material.  We still use it at Seabreeze today.
It catches as much (or more) paper dust as the brass screen, seals
tightly, and lies flat on the backing bar without falling off into the
organ works, as the brass screen was prone to do.

The fabric is perfect for this application in every way.  I have
recommended it to several band organ friends and have given away most
of what I got from LC.  When that began to run out, I went back to LC
and made inquiries of their computer technicians about what became of
the remaining glare screens.  But by that time, ten years later, nobody
remembered what I was talking about.

Then I contacted Small Parts, Inc., a Miami Lakes, Florida, supplier
that is now defunct, to see what kind of filtering mesh might be
similar to what I got from LC.  Small Parts sold nylon, polypropylene,
stainless steel fine-mesh filtering material and many other types.
I sent them a sample of what we were using but they never identified
the fabric or told me what its mesh specifications were.  Since
I wanted this information only to pass on to others, I never pursued
it.  But I did buy some nylon mesh from Small Parts, which I still
have somewhere.

I have since looked on the Internet to find glare screens, but all
those sold today appear to be glass, not the early fabric ones like
LC used to use.

I think I still  have a small sample of the glare screen material that
I got from LC, if anyone wants to try to analyze it.  And of course we
have the two strips in use as dust filters on the Seabreeze organ, but
they are now worth their weight in gold (which is easy to say because
they weight a tiny fraction of an ounce together).

Matthew Caulfield
Irondequoit, New York