Hi Everybody; having run the vacuum cleaner over all easily exposed
carpet in our house yesterday (Sunday) morning, and having done other
domestic duties on Saturday, I felt I could sneak down to the workshop
after lunch and mend another piano roll without too much wifely
opprobrium.

I picked out a large U.K. Aeolian Universal roll that I obtained
from Post-Bid in 1994 and found a note to myself tucked inside the box.
It said "in As New condition except the right hand edge seems stuck to
itself a few feet from the end".  So I mounted it on my roll-repair
table and cautiously unwound it.

Nothing had changed in four years; just before the end each turn was
stuck to the next at one point on the right hand side at the very edge.
With a scalpel I carefully broke the bonds of what was obviously animal
glue and soon had the roll completely unwound.  I think the cause of
the damage was a careless factory hand who had put too much glue on the
spool end before shoving it into the core, and the excess had squeezed
out onto the edge of the roll.

If I'm right, Aeolian rolls were wound onto the core before the right
hand spool end was put on.  Does anybody know if that's so?  If the
excess glue came from the dab put on the core to fix the inside end of
the roll paper, then surely excess glue would not have just adhered to
the very edge.

I think I'm very lucky that the previous owners of this roll stopped
playing it at the point where the damage started, because the roll was
left with a few very small rips on the edge.  About half an hour's work
with Filmoplast tape fixed that and this morning I had the pleasure of
playing a very fine Schumann roll right through for its very first
time.

John Phillips in Hobart, Tasmania.