A few weeks ago, a fellow concertina restorer contacted me to ask if I might be interested in manufacturing reproduction Wheatstone-style nickel-silver-capped buttons. As it happened, I had already been planning to develop the tooling to make this style of button for use on my own instruments.
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I recently fully-restored a 40-button Lachenal Anglo. It was in pretty poor condition when I received it. The wooden ends were non-original, damaged, and not very well made.
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On my first instrument, the ends were held on with commercially-made stainless steel allen-head M3 screws. They work fine, but I felt they gave the instrument a bit of a modern, almost industrial look.
I am currently working on restoring a vintage Lachenal Anglo for a client, and the end bolts and captive nuts are missing or badly worn due to past over-tightening (probably from trying to cure leaks that were actually due to internal structural problems). Needless to say, it wouldn’t have been appropriate to replace them with modern screws. Rather than try to source a better second hand set from a parts dealer, I decided it was time to figure out how to make my own new brass end bolts from scratch.
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My use of a working title to describe my first instrument in the past few blog posts was causing a little confusion, so I have now chosen an official name for the model: the Holden Concertinas Brun.
The name comes from the River Brun, which most historians believe my home town is named after (Brun Ley over time became Burnley)1. The name of the river may have come from the Old English word Brún, which is an adjective meaning, “brown, dark, dusky; having metallic luster, shining.”2