Yesterday I finished a project I've been thinking about for years and have
been actually doing something about for several months.  It's a table for
repairing 88n piano rolls.  It looks like a little wooden coffee table
about 18" (45 cm) long with legs about 5" (12 cm) high.  It's a few cm
wider than a piano roll and has a flat chipboard top with rounded ends.
There is a sheet metal housing screwed to each end of the table.  One
end contains the spring loaded chuck and the drive chuck for a roll.
These were salvaged from a discarded spoolbox found on our local garbage
tip by a friend.  (His find provided the impetus to get this project
going.)  The housing at the other end contains the take-up spool from the
same spoolbox.  Crank handles on the drive chuck shaft and the central
shaft of the take-up spool enable the roll under repair to be moved back
and forth.

So far this sounds like any old repair rig but wait, folks, there's more!

Often, when repairing a roll, one comes across a section where some
(supply your own adjective here) person has applied sticky tape to the
underside of the paper, or where the paper is so badly folded and torn
that access to the underside is necessary.  This outfit makes that
possible; so far I've only described half of it.

The bearings for the shaft of the take-up spool are two brass disks,
about an inch in diameter and a quarter of an inch thick.  The shaft
fits through holes drilled in the centres of the disks.  Each disk has
a shallow trough turned in the middle of its rim.

The sheet metal housing at the take-up end has two vertical U-shaped
cutouts, into which the brass disks' shallow troughs just fit.  This
means that the take-up spool can be lifted up out of the housing at
any time. When I want to get at the underside of a roll I clip a second
"coffee table" with shorter legs to the music roll end of the first table.
This second table has a metal housing with U-shaped slots at its far end.
All I have to do is lift the take-up spool out of its usual position, move
it up and over in a wide arc and fit it into the second set of cutouts.
Hey presto!  The roll is now lying underside up on the second table
surface.

Why does the second table have shorter legs than the first?  Because the
paper is now unwinding from the bottom of the roll rather than the top.

I haven't written all this just to show off, although that was the major
reason.  I do have a serious  question about repair technique.  The most
common damage to piano rolls, as we all know, is little rips along the
edges.  I use Filmoplast P tape for almost all my repairs and do edge
repairs by cutting the tape into short lengths and transferring it bit by
bit to just inside the edge of the paper, using a length of springy wire
set into a short length of wooden dowell.  This enables each piece of tape
to be placed quite accurately but is extremely time consuming.

In an exchange of emails with Terry Smythe months ago, I got the
impression that he puts the tape on so that it overlaps the paper edge
and then slices along the edge with a steel rule and a scalpel.  (I hope
I'm not misrepresenting you, Terry?)  This would be very much quicker
but I have these worries about doing this.

1) There is a danger of cutting roll paper away. (So be very careful,
I suppose?)

2) Because tape adhesive goes right up to, and maybe overlaps the edge
sometimes, there is a danger that successive turns of the rolled up roll
will stick to each other.

Number two really worries me, because I make my own bridging tape from
Filmoplast P, to repair places where the original chaining has pulled
apart. Even though I always rub talcum powder into any exposed adhesive
on the underside of the bridging tape, if a repaired roll is played after
a few months, it is possible to hear the bridging tape un-sticking itself
from the next layer of paper as the roll unwinds.  So far this has caused
no trouble, other than mental distress, but I can envisage a real disaster
if the edges of a repaired roll become glued together.

If anybody has any comments about roll repair techniques before I start on
my huge backlog of damaged rolls, I'd be very interested to hear them.

Merry Christmas, everybody.   John Phillips.