not sure if this is in the right forum or not, and there's nothing revolutionary here but i just had to boast!
my first chromatic (a gift from my parents at age 11) was a chrometta 12 and it has had many, many hours of use since! its only shortcoming are the nails that held it together very tightly... tight enough that i was discouraged on several occasions from trying to remove them during maintenance.
well, a couple of days ago i decided enough was enough! i spent about 40 minutes tapping all 10 nails out with a hammer and a standoff post i stole from my pile of discarded/broken electronics. as difficult as it was it was immensely satisfying to clean out 15 years worth of gunk!
then i ran into a problem, though, which is that no matter how hard i tried i could NOT get the nails back in, even after trying to widen the holes in the reedplate a tiny bit. i had rendered it useless!
fast forward to today, i went to the hardware store, where i bought some #2-5/8" screws and nuts. i knew #2 (sorry, i'm not sure what that is in metric!) was a little bit too big, but i thought the difference would be minor. well, i was wrong. i ended up having to do a lot of drilling to the reedplates with a hand drill and the lousy bits that i have (that are
not meant for brass). i also had to widen some of the holes in the comb... but only some. for whatever reason the pre-existing holes were of varying widths.
turns out 5/8" was
just the right length, as you can see in the picture. i fastened them all together and my chrometta is as good as — nay, BETTER than new! once again it is by far my most airtight, and least fiddly-chromatic! (now if only they made a tenor version...)
so no, this was not very difficult (especially compared to wood comb conversions), but i'd never done anything of the sort before and i am positively thrilled that i was able to do it with sub-par tools and equipment, and most of all that the operation was a complete success! so please, forgive my vanity; i had to share!
lower reedplate finished, upper plate only two holes done:
assembled topside:
assembled bottomside (i didn't feel confident enough to tap the plates, nor do i have tapping tools, which is why i went the nut route). you can see the screws are barely long enough!:
