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December 01 Scanner and perforator progressThe much anticipated Keystone catalog arrived in the mail last week and I'm told today the web page designer has all the information he needs to complete his work. Richard Groman tells me we should see www.keystonemusicroll.com coming online within a week. With a pile of 150 rolls in the queue to be scanned, I have made a more efficient work center with two scanners for accomplishing this task. The prototype scanner (serial No. 1) had earlier been removed from its original equipment rack and stripped of its original temporary wiring. I decided it should be made the same as the 8 production scanners and is a lot more portable in this configuration. The photos show the wiring in progress and the end result. Yesterday, I spent a little over 10 hours keeping the two scanners running and managed to scan 61 Ampico rolls, averaging about 10 minutes per roll. This mode keeps me quite busy and there is no more staring at the monitor and falling asleep. Today, the MIDI files were rendered and uploaded to www.IAMMP.org .
The Aeolian American perforator is progressing nicely. The wiring has been added for powering the drive motor. I made standoffs to place under the motor for properly tensioning the belt and after a little oiling and greasing, the machine sprang to life with the punch ram bobbing up and down at about 10 strokes per second. Before the die set could be installed, I felt it prudent to remove all the surface rust and hardened grease from the punch ram assembly and all moving parts. Nearly all of that is done now except for a few paper rollers. I did a dry-run assembly of the solenoid bank and decided the terminal boards were in too poor condition to be reused. After some searching, I found the perfect substitute. Insulated turret terminals with a 6-32 male stud will fit the two existing tapped holes in each solenoid. Made by Cambion, they should arrive in mid January. The organ rank driver and microprocessor should be shipping from the supplier in a couple weeks. I also purchased a Yamaha MDF-3 for sending MIDI data to the perforator. We did have some success testing Julie Porters Compact Flash MIDI filer in Bethlehem on the last visit. It sequenced several roll master files successfully and we think we can work out a couple of minor bugs once I have this perforator in a state where the testing can continue.
Other ongoing projects such as the Chickering restoration will be moving forward during the Winter and I've got my wheels turning devising a way of scanning or photographing the Ampico master stencils. Richard was gratious enough to lend me an Ampico-A 30 to 1 stencil and an Ampico-B 30 to 1 stencil which are different in width. He will also be sending a few older examples with the wavy left edge (pumping line) and some of the more fragile ones which can no longer be run on the perforator. I will try and find a way to preserve the information on some of these extremely delicate master stencils, some of which are literally falling apart. More on that in future articles.
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