[CAUT] killer half-octave

[Ron Nossaman]

> The "bell" is a plate nose bolt support, right?  

Right, and mass load.


>Any thoughts on why 
> that original design used an expensive casting rather than an extra 
> beam?  Ease of assembly?
> 
> --Cy--


Thoughts? Sure, though I can't say I really know. I think it 
was an afterthought, and a result of the tone collector 
bracing design. All those massive beams converging at the horn 
didn't provide anything in the way of bracing for the entire 
top three quarters of the scale, which I suspect they realized 
when they started building them this way and listened to them. 
They knew they needed treble bracing, but adding real braces 
would cast justifiable doubt on the tone collector concept, so 
they added as nearly invisible a little bitty stick as they 
could to the middle of that long unbraced span of belly rail. 
The plate was still proved to need a nose bolt up there, and 
they already had a little stick indicating that the tone 
collector was a less than ideal design concept, so they came 
up with a patch that improved the situation without making the 
tone collector look any worse, that they could add a dash of 
marketing mystique to and turn a band aid into a feature. It 
worked too. Odd, isn't it, that the area where the belly rail 
is under braced is where the killer octave and all the tuned 
duplexes are, as well as the skinny little stick and bell?

Then there's the "pulsator" in the bass of the B where a real 
cutoff should have been. Also a post design "fix", in my opinion.

Ron N