I can only hope you like to read! I worked so hard on this project. This old Hohner accordion, dated 22.2.24, on this inside, breaths new life. This would not have been possible, if it weren't for Elton Doucet, entirely fixing the fingerboard.

It's in the key of high octave A. With Mid / Low / Mid reeds. Two laying flat, the low bank standing. Something interesting to note, is that back in the old days, Europeans did not tune to 440, as we know. This thing was tuned a number of cents flat, but that was their standard.

The very first thing I did was take off the old bellows (black and red with dividers). While I love the looks of them more, they were worthless. Coincidentally, I used the Hohner bellows that were on my Cajun brand accordion, made by Elton Doucet. Whoever owned the Cajun brand accordion before wanted to use parts from his HA114B, including reeds. Luckily for me I took them off of the Cajun brand accordion, and used Italian bellows I had sitting around.

To put these HA114B bellows on the old Hohner, I had to be extremely careful not to damage the fabric with the printed M. Hohner / Highest award 1915, etc - on the bellows frames.

The next step was painting the wood of the frames, that connected the bellows. There was a good amount of space that was plain wood, so I painted it black, all around, to match the bellows.

I took out the reeds, soaked them in acetone, then put new leathers on them. They sat in bowls, until I got the fingerboard from Elton.

Elton did a lot of work to fix up that fingerboard, and put goatskin on the bass (spoon) flappers. He put extension springs on the pivots/fingerboard, so it had exactly what Cajun accordions have. He put new felt on the flappers I removed the tarnish from, so the valves seal perfectly. And, he did something I didn't notice at first. The fingerboard originally was one piece, but he sawed it in half, like Cajun accordions of the past half century. It allowed me to bend, adjust the height of the buttons, and perfect the sealing of the flappers / rods.

Once I got all that done, I installed all the treble reeds. I did the bass side, while the fingerboard was away.

Before I installed the reeds, I noticed the standing block was detaching itself from in inside. This is typical of an accordion, almost a century old. Once I glued, and held it together for 2 hours, I was ready to go.

After all this, as I expected, it was completely out of tune. I first tuned the bass side. It was soooooo bad. Then tuned the low / mid dry banks on the treble side. It was extremly hard to tune the wet tuned mid. I had no reference for how many beats each reed would be, so I inaccurately tuned it to a progresive tuning. I didn't obsessively do it to the higher mid reeds, because they're so fecking small, and OLD!

I kept investigating where leaks appeared, and the last I found were around the entire faceplates. Every gap was glued inside, and no more leaks appeared, and the thing is as tight as you'd expect a brand new HA114. The bass flapper spoons always leak a tiny bit, but that's the nature of the beast.

Anyway, thank you for reading. Here's the video

That sounds awesome, you did a nice job. I love the tone of those old reeds.

Excellent, both the box and the playing.

Lots of great music has been made on Hohners.

Wow. that's the sound and that playing style from the days of old i love ... and what a terrific job done by the both of you: congrats, Maestro ! - Nout

Better than new, just as it should be!
Thanks

Very cool and very interesting, Jim.

This has got to bring you close to a complete chromatic octave of accordions, low G to dog whistle.

Love it! Want one!

Excellent work. Nice to see and hear the finished project. Good on you. Keep searching flea bay and rescuing the good old boxes!

Nice work Jim, and great laid back playing.
I've noticed that you leave your pinky out of it and employ it when you want to make the box squeal. would like to get this effect into my playing but would have to re-train my fingers so that my ring finger was hitting the high end of the octave thus reserving my pinky. Is this something you had to go through?