•I have read and heard from various sources about Perflex. Apparently, many pipe organs were maintained using it as well as player restora- tions. Since so many people and companies used it, it must have been seen as a good choice for the price, and trusted for use at the time. What was it's history...

•Perflex was "the answer to a dream" -- the greatest stuff since sliced bread! The early advertisements claimed it would last at least 70 years: "Wonderful air-tight replacement for leather!" Then things started happening -- nothing worked! The truth is, it was lucky to have a life-span of 70 months...

•Bob Loesch is quite right about the Perflex. The M.P. Möller Company used some very early Perflex in their pipe organs. The earliest material is still going strong. Within a year or two the composition was changed and that stuff is what did the real damage. My mentor, Richard S. Villemin, never tru...

Just curious about the pouch material "Tuftane." Never heard of that one. Does anyone know more about it? Perflex was truly a joke, as, in our Missouri environment it might last up to two years in an instrument which was played heavily, and yet was advertised to be a virtually indestructible plastic...

Richard Vance's credentials suggest that he might be a person who could tell us why Perflex -- that infamous pouch panacea of the '70s turned plague of the '80s -- disintegrated spontaneously after a few years. I've heard various theories, including the popular notion that the heat deformation to fo...

•Ref: Materials for Rebuilding. In Digest 980411 Ed Gaida wrote: > A lot has been written through the years about various materials used > in rebuilding the pneumatic units of player pianos. > Perflex was hailed as the perfect replacement for tan pouch leather. > The Austin Organ Company could proba...

•Bill Masterman wrote: > Over the weekend, I purchased a bunch of new old stock orchestrion > and nickelodeon parts manufactured by the PPCo ... late 70s or early > 80s ... If you plan to sell or use the stuff, anything with pouches was likely pouched with Perflex, and will be useless unless torn ap...

•George Bogatko asked: > What was it's history? What was it made of? Why did so many trust > and use it? Hi, George. I can't tell you what it's made of, but I can tell you that it almost bankrupted the Austin Organ Co. I was working as a pipe organ tech in the late 60s when it first came out, and I ...

•Bob Taylor wrote in 030317 MMDigest: > The miracle pouch material, Perflex, was tried and seemed to be the > "new wave" to replace tan pouch leather. The trouble was, Perflex, > was never meant to be a pouch or anything like it. I am one of many who was "screwed" by Perflex when I rebuilt my Duo-Ar...

•Perflex, the long sad story, and other modern substances This is the story of Perflex as I saw it. During the Vietnam War our government researchers came up with a substance that they could make large bags out of. These bags were to carry water to the troops. The bags they came up with could be rol...

•Bill Maguire wrote in 091107 MMDigest, "Repairing Pneumatics...": > ... This went against everything I ever experienced and was told > about Perflex. Back when I was in the organ repair business, and Perflex was brand new, I was sent a sample of Perflex from the factory to try out. Being a purist, ...

•Interesting that Perflex is rearing its ugly head again. Perhaps I can explain a bit about it. My father was a colonel in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and was marginally involved in the Perflex disaster. When I was tearing my hair out about it, he told me that originally it was ordered by the Army ...

•> [ On 1963/08/09 Union Carbide Corp. was granted copyright on the > [ trademark "Perflex", a "Plastic Film and Sheeting for Use as > [ Wrapping and Packaging Material." Perflex is a trade name encompassing many products still available. Uses today, apart from food services industries, include the ...

•I _am_ against using Perflex for pouches like most everyone reading MMDigest. However, I have run across maybe a dozen 10- to 30-year-old Universal player actions with Perflex pouches in Baldwin or Story and Clark pianos. The majority of the player systems function well and all they need is tuning...

•Hi All, As it was related to me by John Omiatek (the head engineer at Classic Player Pianos and now Storey & Clark Pianos), Classic Player Pianos stopped using the Perflex pouch material when they went into production of their player pianos. After much research and product testing, Classic settled ...

•How to make bad plastic materials. My wife, a quality engineer, used to work at a factory that made plasticized rubber. Some batches were good, and some were bad and got rejected. By using a derivative of Marx's labor theory of value, those bad batches were judged to contain the value of the work t...

•Leather pouches are so easy to install; they are what the old guys used; they'll stand up for decades to a Duo-Art pulling up to 100 inches suction. I can't imagine a reasonable argument for using foreign glue and materials to "restore" a valuable antique piece of Americana. We would not allow Perf...

•Hello everyone -- I hope you can stand another horror story regarding the perils of Perflex, and cheerfully remove it from any player stack without crying too much. I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet... Several years ago some friends of mine restored a fine Wurlitzer theatre organ, enlarged...

Tom Reefer recently suggested [on the PIPORG-L list]an interesting movie plot about Perflex (the synthetic leather substitute from the 1970s that showed much promise but then failed miserably after a dozen years in use). Some (long) time ago, we had a posting here on PIPORG-L about how Perflex's for...

•As a player piano technician , John Omiatek has been a great resource for help on these. John will spend the time And educate people like myself. John gave me the "heads up" to watch out for failing Perflex pouches on some of these. I used what I thought was some very thin flexible "zephyr skin" (s...