Harmonetta

  Harmonetta (26)

Engineer and harmonica maker Zombor 

. One of the best and best known hungarian harmonica playes, Tamás Szabó came to me one day, to repair his Harmonetta. I did it for him, actually several times. One day he showed up again with a specimen of the instrument in the state of a complete wreckage. It was lying somewhere in lofts for many years, but was a piece of history. It was the instrument used by several history hungarian harmonica bands/trios until it ended up in an exhibition window of a pub completely non functional. It was broken, with a missing cover and missing parts. As I have done compete stripdowns by then, I took on the job. I took it apart, cleaned it, embossed the reedplates, replaced broken reeds, added new valves, and replaced all the external brass valve strips with lasercut stainless ones. As one of the covers was missing, I had to figure out something. Since I had a 3D printer, I took measures of the original cover and recreated it in CAD, then printed it out. It was after many failed attempts that I got it right. Then I lasercut the pattern and name into it, sanded and spray painted it in metallic red.

The result was a great looking new instrument and made Tamás very happy. Besides this, I saved a piece of the hungarian harmonica heritage