I'm currently restoring a Weber Duo-Art.  Some parts of it were
untouched in the eighty years since the piano left the factory, a few
were missing, the sustaining pedal pneumatic had been beautifully
restored, and a few pneumatics were restored with some form of white
glue.  I've dealt with the removal of the white glue and recovered those
pneumatics.  Curses on those who use white glue on parts that need to be
disassembled!

The accordion pneumatics were actually missing, but I had a set from
another mechanism, and they fit nicely.  Those replacement accordion
pneumatics had a cloth that I had never seen before, very thin,
apparently air-tight, but when I opened up the unit, there was a gray
film  coating the inside of the pneumatic cloth.  The same film had
stuck to the wood, and was a  royal pain to remove.  It appears as if
the people who restored the accordion pneumatics put a thin layer of
some kind of cement over all the cloth and then fitted the cloth to the
wood.  Very strange.

I had a real delight, however, when I started to work on the stack.  The
pneumatics were held in place only by the screws that tied them to the
rails.  Between the pneumatics and the decks was a piece of pouch
leather that had rotted, making it extremely easy to remove them.  Now I
have a question for this esteemed forum:

I would like to make it as easy for the next curator of this piano to
remove the pneumatics as it was for me.  That is, I would like to put a
piece of pouch leather or other gasket material on the decks to
facilitate removal.  I'm concerned, however, that this could be the
first thing to fail and that the pneumatics would start to fall off the
deck long before their life span is up.  In this piano, that certainly
was not the case: the pneumatic cloth was brittle and tore easily, while
the pneumatics adhered to their decks.

Does anyone have comments on this dilemma?

Eli Shahar