http://www.imagestation.com/picture/sraid141/p32fd7621bfa9ddc5e15c612ae7777c60/f6cabf74.jpg
elongated wear on the hinge may be from the downward pressure I’m talking about.
Marc just finally made himself a new concert pitch set in his “spare time” and now finally has a new (pair of?) bellows as well.
(2 in fact, one is from a Full B set someone didn’t want when it was done, so he kept it, now everyone wants it when they hear it.. :p)
The bellows of his old warhorse set were totally worn out, the hinge is nowhere near thinking of being worn though. 
I got a similar bellows, like you say.., like a bloody fortress.. 
I should really make pics of those sets, they look and sound kind of nice.. hehe
David, I think you know what I’m talking about. On an older bellows with a leather hinge you will find the clappers skewed or non-parallel. Like a pair of old shoes they hold that crooked shape as they age. The metal hinge holds the clapper boards parallel and aligned so you won’t see this happen except in the extreme cases like the picture above where the hinge pin has elongated the hole on the hinge leaf.
It occurs to me that a bellows hinge could be made in the form of a simple gimbal, or perhaps a ball joint, which would keep the small end of the bellows at a fixed distance apart, while allowing the two cheeks to rotate independently.
Has anyone tried this?
Jonathan
Billh wrote
the hinge itself seems to have been intended to be a flexible lace
I think you’ll find that the correct term for a leather lace is “thong”, but not many people know that these days (no doubt the combination of those three words in one sentence is enough to trigger spamblockers throughout middle America ).
More seriously, I’m totally useless on the regulators, so don’t quote me as an authority. But I suspect that the combination of a thong hinge and a pretty flexible leather connecting-tube between bellows and bag, as was common in older sets, would make it much easier to play the regs (and particularly to pick out individual keys with the heel of the hand) than the now-common metal or ultra-stiff leather hinge and rigid garden hosepipe connecting-tube.
I use bellows of the french style with curved wood on the backside, and I find them very comfortable
the only disadvantage is that I can accidentely disconnect the hose from the bellows if I havn’t pushed it in properly. In these pics I have the hose disconnected from the bag for some reason, think it was while ordering a new set of pipes for the same bellows
/Anders
It littlebit more respect for my GREAT set of pipes PLEASE
[/quote]
part of a quote
theory -
internal musculo-skeletal stresses slowly wearing away at their …um…musculo-skeletal bits
Cheers
DavidG[/quote]
no problem with my right arm working on a metal hinge
my left arm is hurting because of intensive playing 7 reeds
Carel
I have to agree on that
I visited him, asking to finetune my D set for a performance
(good to have a gentle pipemaker around)
He played on his new B set on that occasion
leaving me in a shock
and hard labour
(to order one)
Don’t make pictures Rick
that makes the waitinglist too long
Carel
Partly due to gravity, the leather hinge allows the clappers to shift as shown in the pictures:
Good point! 