___         _            _
| _ \_____ _(_)_____ __ _(_)
|   / -_) V / / -_) V  V /_
|_|_\___|\_/|_\___|\_/\_/(_)


              _  __                     ____         __  __  _ _
             / |/ /__ ____  ______ __  / __/______ _/ /_/ /_(_| )__
            /    / _ `/ _ \/ __/ // / / _// __/ _ `/ __/ __/ /|(_-<
           /_/|_/\_,_/_//_/\__/\_, / /_/ /_/  \_,_/\__/\__/_/ /___/
                              /___/
          ____    __             __  ___           __  ___         _
         / __/___/ /  ___  ___  / / / _/__  ____  /  |/  /_ _____ (_)___
        _\ \/ __/ _ \/ _ \/ _ \/ / / _/ _ \/ __/ / /|_/ / // (_-</ / __/
       /___/\__/_//_/\___/\___/_/ /_/ \___/_/   /_/  /_/\_,_/___/_/\__/

          ___              ___          __                __  _
         / _ )_____  __   / _ \___ ___ / /____  _______ _/ /_(_)__  ___
        / _  / _ \ \/ /  / _, / -_|_-</ __/ _ \/ __/ _ `/ __/ / _ \/ _ \
       /____/\___/_/\_\ /_/ |_\__/___/\__/\___/_/  \_,_/\__/_/\___/_//_/

 [ Review:
 [
 [     Nancy Fratti's
 [    School For Music
 [    Box Restoration


               -------------------------------------------------
                Nancy Fratti's School For Music Box Restoration
               -------------------------------------------------
                            A Review By Larry Smith

Like a lot of high-tech computer types you may know of, I have a secret
yen for the purely mechanical.  This affliction impels me toward all
manner of anachronistic amusements, mechanical music being chief among
them, with antique musical boxes being foremost of all.  It's an
expensive hobby - especially in view of the prices charged by some
"restorers" - and so the small-scale collector is usually restricted to
collecting boxes that are showing their ages fairly obviously.  Since
many of these ages date back to the middle of the last century, they
are seldom very playable, and so they wait until the money builds up
once again so they might visit a restorer - an experience that can be a
distinctly mixed blessing, as you may have learned from reading of my
recent experiences along these lines.

But like most adults, I have fond memories of disassembling an alarm
clock or two in my youth - and even of _re_assembling them - and
musical boxes certainly don't _look_ all that complicated.  Like many
of those at the "strictly small-time" end of collecting these wonderful
machines, I harbored a secret desire to get my own hands dirty in their
mechanical innards and bring them back to life myself.  But I
restrained myself - knowing as I do some of the pitfalls that some
professionals can fall into, and recalling that these are not _merely_
machines, but genuine musical instruments - I worried that I could
damage a real treasure out of sheer ignorance.

As it turns out, it is seldom one finds a box that has not suffered at
one time or another in its life, by finding itself in the hands of
people with far less circumspection than I.  Indeed, this is why most
of them need to _be_ restored - - but I am getting ahead of myself.  It
was while I was musing on these very thoughts to my companions in
automatic musical instruments on the Internet that I discovered
Panchronia Antiquities, and the unusual service it offers at rare
intervals.

And so, on the week of June 24th, 1996, I spent my summer vacation in
the tiny town of White Hall, New York, learning exactly how to restore
musical boxes from a personable and knowledge pair of experienced
restorers.  It wasn't an easy week...but I learned a number of
invaluable lessons.

Nancy Fratti - owner of Panchronia Antiquities - sponsors the school
every other year.  Though the effort of it engenders considerable doubt
that it will ever be offered again, it has been run on even numbered
years for quite some time.  The beginner's program runs a full week -
40 hours - of what amounts to a very, very specialized shop class where
one learns how to disassemble, diagnose, repair, clean, refurbish and
reassemble a "standard" cylinder musical box.  Tuition this year was
$1300 - and each student had to provide a suitably inoperative box for
them to work on.

The course begins with the open house the Sunday before the first
class, where you settle up any outstanding balance with Nancy, and
perhaps pick out one of her "student" boxes to work on, if you don't
have one, or it is not "suitably" broken.  Ideally the box will need a
tooth tip or two, and at least one entire tooth replaced.  I picked up
a small box with a missing tooth, though neither it, nor any of my
other boxes needed any tips - an unusual and somewhat inopportune
blessing that I was forced to suffer with.

Classes began the following Monday at 9:00 AM sharp with introductions
to the "headmaster" of the school, Mr. Joe Roush, and his quick-witted
assistant, Chuck Walker, two of the most engaging gentleman I can
recall meeting in recent memory.  Both have been doing restorations for
many years to exacting standards, and are as familar with these types
of instruments as any you are likely to meet - - which does not
preclude the likelihood of your box springing a complete and utter
surprise on you during the course, but it does serve to lessen it
some-what.  Classes are restricted to a maximum of six students, to
assure an adequate supply of time for each.

The first day concentrates on proper disassembly, and this is one of
the most important - perhaps I should say, one of the most critical -
phases, since it is during this part that most boxes come to grief.  We
are taught how to properly "power down" the box and release the spring
fully before attempting to disconnect anything.  This is a simple but
crucial procedure, and overlooking it - as beginners are all too wont
to do - can easily lead to someone disconnecting the governor while
there is still power in the spring, a situation that can lead to a
"run" - where all the power of the spring is released all at once,
spinning the cylinder to a high speed, smashing its pins against the
delicate teeth of the comb and damaging both to an incredible degree -
and once this happens, the only remedy is extensive and expensive comb
repair, and complete repinning of the cylinder itself, which is an
exacting task for an expensive specialist and probably beyond the
ability of any amateur restorer.

This phase is the longest time you are called upon to "watch this", and
lasts most of the morning.  Once you have a good idea of the issues
involved, you spend the afternoon taking apart your own box, with Joe
and Chuck circulating around (actually, Joe and Chuck circulate most of
the time during the rest of the week, so henceforth this shall go
without saying) to catch anyone making any classic errors and
endangering their box.

Most of us discovered heavy wear in the governor, mostly in the
"endless" - musical boxes use an endless-screw/worm-gear arrangement
that uses the resistance of the air to a pair of spinning vanes to slow
down and control the power of the spring - and most of the afternoon is
taken up with how to detect and deal with this wear by grinding away
flattened spots and polishing gear teeth.  Most of us also discovered
damage to the geneva gears - genevas were invented to allow the box to
"count" the number of winds on the spring, to prevent over winding.
However, as with most fool-proofing devices, fools have proven
themselves ingenious enough to deal with any amount of protection...the
application of no small amount of muscle had completely emasculated the
gears on both my smaller boxes - and, as I later discovered after going
home, on my larger box as well.  Ham-handed over winding appears to be
nearly a given in any box in need of restoration.  The lack of
standards for these various types of parts makes these simple-sounding
repairs into nightmares, and even Nancy's considerable inventory of
spares is seldom equal to the task without a great deal of grinding and
file-work to adapt them to your particular box.  You will want to get
to know and love your needle files.  Someday they may save your life.
Or, at least, your musical box.

After that morning, we were well ready to take a break - lunches, by
the way, are included in the tuition, and these simple but
well-prepared catered meals were served in a screen tent in back of
Nancy's castle-like home were most welcome breaks in our work.  Since a
hefty part of the labor involved squinting through various type of
magnifiers at teeny little parts, you spend a lot of time hunched into
strange positions - you don't move around much, but, believe me, you
can develop a killing hungar.

By the second day, you are into the real meat of the course - repairing
and refurbishing the comb.  The comb is the heart and soul of a musical
box, the quality of the comb is the quality of the entire box - and it
is the comb that is the most in harm's way.  On the second day, you
learn how to replace the broken tip of a tooth.

Among the various types of comb damage, broken tips are probably the
second-most common.  Dampers are first, but replacing them is finicky
work that can't be accomplished until all the other comb work is
completed anyway, and so is left for the last two days of the course.
It is easy to see why tips are such a problem if you examine a musical
box in any detail - while the teeth on the comb can be fairly robust
pieces of steel, the tips narrow down to the thickness of a few sheets
of paper, to exactly match the diameter of the pins on the cylinder
that must pluck them.  If the tips are too wide, they will not only
catch the pins that are supposed to pluck them, but they will
"side-swipe" pins that happen to be close to the track they are
playing, producing a chirp or grinding noise or even a completely wrong
note at odd points within the song.  Since the steel of the comb is
tempered to a fair degree of hardness, the tips are very vulnerable to
abuse, and it is not at all common to lose half of them or more in a
bad "run".

Tips are replaced by using a ruby-dust-coated disk in a flexible shaft
drill.  The comb is carefully fed into the cutter and a slice made into
the tooth at the point where the new tip is to be.  Special "tipping
wire" is then bias-cut to fit the root of the slot, and flux applied
liberally to the wire and slot.  The tip is then soldered into place
using a low-temperature but very strong solder and a fairly weak
soldering iron - all of this to prevent heating the tooth unduly, which
will weaken its temper and change its tone (and thus, ruin the music it
makes - it is surprising how many people "fixed" musical boxes down
through history, treating them as mere machines and not as the musical
instruments they are.  Many boxes are found today with very indifferent
tooth replacements - they are mechanically correct, and the box
"works", but they simply do not sound "right".  In fact, they can sound
_awful_.)  The need to deflux the piece is stressed whenever we reach
for the solder - the flux is a fairly powerful acid that can oxidize
steel overnight or even more quickly, and so we are taught to soak the
comb and rinse our hands in bicarb solution to neutralize this acid as
soon as we are finished with any soldering operation.

Late on the second day and into the third, we also learned how to
"spin" the cylinders.  Cylinders are made of brass, and the pins are of
steel, and the combination could lead to funny "clinking" noises as the
cylinder resonates to each note plucked.  The Swiss (and it was almost
entirely the Swiss who made this type of musical box) solved this
problem by loading each cylinder with a layer of cement to make the
cylinder less resonant, and to help hold the pins in place.  This
cement is, according to Chuck's exacting chemical analysis, merely 30%
pine resin, and 70% plaster of paris.  It serves the purpose, but it
isn't ideal, and one of the drawbacks is that it softens at the
relatively low temperature of 90 degrees - just a couple of hours in a
hot car can do real harm to one of these types of boxes.

It is possible, of course, to replace the cement with some more modern
and less troublesome material - Joe mentioned some restorers who have
used such material as PVC - but this shades over the line of
"restoring" and into "rebuilding", and the box is left in a state
significantly different from its original one - and such people are
also leaving potential problems for future restorers.  The cement is a
known quantity, and the remedy for this problem is a fairly trivial
one, and Chuck showed us how to spin the cylinder in a lathe applying
enough heat to reflow the cement and distribute it nicely around the
inside of the cylinder.

Cleaning the cylinder is much the same.  Again, it is chucked up in a
lathe, and then a brass cleaner (or a silver cleaner for nickel-plated
cylinders) is used along with fine chalk powder.  This is not all
power-work - it involves a lot of elbow grease, but the result can be a
bright, shiny cylinder.  One of mine came out so nice it was hard to
see it was the same, grimy cylinder I'd started with.  Sadly, however,
my other cylinder was beyond the basic help of this class - the box had
suffered a "run" and the pins were beaten aside or broken outright, and
so it was sent off to a music box restorer's restorer, a professional
repinner.  This process takes two to four months (possibly more), but
the result will be a nice, clean, freshly repinned cylinder.  This is
not cheap, however - even for my small cylinder, the service is $47 per
inch, and goes up for larger diameter cylinders.

The third and fourth day was largely taken up with the single biggest
issue that can face a restorer - crafting a replacement tooth.  This is
far too involved a section to do more than summarize here.  One must
first remove the stub of the old tooth, again employ the slit cutter to
remove the base and a section of the comb itself, tidy and deepen the
slit with hand files, then cut and shape a new tooth that will fit that
slot.  The new tooth must be hardened and tempered in a time-honored
process that should be learned from someone who knows how, and then
soldered into place using appropriate safegaurds to avoid heating the
comb to the point where it loses temper - because if it does, then the
comb may very well be completely ruined, and certainly beyond the
capabilities of the amateur restorer.  If it is a bass tooth then a
lead weight must be soldered into place - - preferably without
_de_soldering the base of the tooth where it is fixed in the comb, or
doing the same to the lead weights of the teeth to either side.

Frankly, I found this section to be the most exacting and exhausting
part of the course, and it made me very sorry indeed I hadn't taken
metal shop in high school when I had the chance - a chance I had had
far more recently than the other members of my class, I noticed.  Since
I am but recently arrived at the "wrong side" of 40, I was feeling my
age until I discovered I was bringing the average age of the class down
by a considerable amount, which made me feel much better.  I commence
to hope, however, my hands are as steady as Chuck's are when I reach
_his_ age.

The fourth and final days were dedicated to the fine art of dampering a
comb.  Dampers are the least-understood - but most crucial - part of
restoring a comb.  Underneath each tooth is a little bit of wire
perhaps a quarter of an inch long that curves up to the tip from a
point perhaps an eighth of the inch back from the very tip (a spot
called the "anvil").  As the cylinder revolves, the pins come up to
this bit of wire before contacting the tooth, and the springiness of
the wire dampens the residual vibration of the tooth, if any - then the
pin slides past the damper and connects with the tooth tip to produce a
good, firm pluck.  Without the damper, the pin could come up under the
tooth as it still vibrates from the last note it sounded, which would
give you a short moment of bare-metal-vibrating-on-bare-metal resulting
in a huge variety of unpleasant noises, from piercing bird-like chirps
to grunts, grinding or buzzing noises, even burping sounds.  The
dampers are located in the anvil by tiny little pegs called "tapered
pins", and those who bought them were issued special dampering kits by
Joe which provided a jig and punches to insert the pegs.  We were
taught how to locate these pins, remove them, insert a new damper, and
repeg it in place.  Or, in my case, to peg it in place, since I
discovered that, at some point in history, someone not so versed in
these niceties had thoughtfully redampered my comb by _soldering_ the
dampers directly to the top of the anvil.  This made it very convenient
to locate the old holes, but I can only hope that that restorer retuned
the teeth to account for the weight of solder he added, and that he
managed to do the job without ruining the temper of the comb - two
things I shall not find out until my repinned cylinder comes back and I
can reassemble the movement - at which point I will have invested over
$800 in this box, quite aside from the amount of my personal time.
This is especially worrisome in view of the fact that this job was
certainly done without the benefit of modern, low-temperature solders,
which means a fair amount of heat was certainly applied.  These kinds
of uncertainties are part and parcel of musical box restoration,
however, and really cannot be helped.  Chances are, the box is not
beyond help - but as a friend of mine likes to observe, "sometimes you
are the windshield, and sometimes you are the bug."  You take your
chances.

While I did not get the opportunity to reassemble my box, one of my
classmates did do so, and we did get to enjoy the fruits of her labors
in the last few minutes before we broke up.  The dampers were not all
installed, but the box managed to sing a few tunes for us nevertheless,
promising a great reward for finishing the work remaining.

I was amazed at the patience and abilities of Joe and Chuck, and the
amount of work they and Nancy had invested in this course.  Each of us
was equipped with a Fordham flexible drill, a full complement of files,
loups, and other assorted tools, and access to Sherline and jeweler's
lathes to simplify our work.  The selection of tools never lacked, and
our instructors were never at a loss for a remedy to a problem - even
if that remedy was "it needs to be done by an expert" - - and they
invested no small amount of work after hours handling jobs that needed
to be done but were beyond the abilities of their students.  I was
likewise impressed at their considerable ability to recover from errors
made in the course of repairs and salvage huge amounts of work that
would otherwise have been wasted.  And, like the best teachers, they
were seldom at a loss to explain the whys and wherefores, and the lore
about musical boxes and their construction that I picked up in this
course was considerable.

Unlike some previous times when I came away from an "expert" restorer's
work, I found the Panchronia team to have made for an enriching
experience, unstinting of sharing their "secrets" and certainly not
above learning a thing or two from their students.  As Joe pointed out,
musical boxes were built, and to a large extent, must be maintained,
using 19th century methods in a 20th century labor market.  No one is
ever going to get rich restoring musical boxes - not monetarily, anyway
- but the more people who can do the basic repairs and cleaning that
can give a musical box a shot at life into another century, the better
off I think we will all be.  I think it was Arthur Ord-Hume who
observed that we do not "own" musical boxes in the usual sense of the
word - we are but incidents along the way in the box's own life, it
lived before us, and it will - if we are careful - continue to live
after us.  And it's a nice feeling to think that someday some box we
refurbish will pleasure someone else as it sings to them, thanks to our
efforts.  They are an invaluable bit of our musical and mechanical
history, and well worth the effort.  And I fervently hope my three will
benefit from this education.  I think they will.

regards,
Larry Smith

Nancy Fratti - "Specialist in Antique Music Boxes and Restoration Supplies"
Panchronia Antiquities
P.O.B. 210
White Hall, NY  12887-0210

(518) 282-9770
(518) 282-9800 (fax)

A catalog of available supplies, disks for disk boxes, and CD's of music
boxes is available for $5.

regards,
Larry Smith