9/32 agraffes (DNA)

[Ron Nossaman]

I finished stringing my M&H and chipped it up to pitch today. I used the
9/32 x 36tpi agraffes from Schaff, tapping the plate to fit. I had ordered
36 trichords, just in case, and still ended up five short of a usable set,
the balance of which came today. Eighteen of the original 36 trichords were
double helix thread. No problem with the mono, and bichord. I've been
hearing about these double helix suckers for a long time now, and I was
totally mystified as to why Schaff still had them in their inventory. When I
phoned them to get enough single helix to fill out my job, I found out. They
don't know the difference. I talked to the guy for fifteen minutes, a couple
of times, and I couldn't in any way describe what a double helix thread is
(and I tried EVERY way I could think of). He kept saying "It fits the thread
gauge", and kept not hearing my attempts at explanations. He also said that
they send these out all the time to "some of the top rebuilders in the
country" and never had a complaint. Bull! He wants me to send back all the
double helix stuff, presumably so their machinist can check them with the
thread gauge again. As a public service, I spent about an hour this morning
making a gauge of my own, which I intend to send back with the double helix
junk. It's a clam shell deal, hinged on one end, with locator pins to align
everything when it's closed. There's a hole drilled and tapped in from the
side, so you get half a hole in each half of the clamshell when you open it
up (like a bullet or sinker mold). When a single helix shank is laid in the
hole and the gauge is closed, it closes all the way. With a double helix, it
won't. When they get this gauge, they will no longer have any "reasonable"
excuse for having the double helix threads in stock, since they will have a
highly mistake resistant way of determining which is which, and should be
able to see for themselves what works in a single helix threaded hole and
what doesn't. I'm telling you this so you'll know that a gauge exists, and
Schaff will shortly have it in their possession. I also took one of the
double helix agraffe shaped objects, and glued two different colored sewing
threads, one in each, into the thread tracks so they can see how the threads
interleave. It has a certain symmetry, doesn't it? Maybe, just maybe this
will work.

Now, your mission, should you care to help, is to contact Schaff with
requests for replacement, or at least acknowledgement of the problem, of all
the double helix threaded agraffes you got through the years and were unable
to use. This action, along with the gauge, will hopefully lend credibility
to the project and possibly trigger a search for a Lake Zurich machinist who
knows a thread when he sees one. All of you top rebuilders in this fine
country must surely have hundreds of them laying around by now if they have
been shipped in anywhere near the volume the guy at Schaff indicated. Just
give it a couple of days for the gauge to get there first or you'll just be
yodeling down the well. 

This is all a totally unnecessary pain in the butt, and I'm going to make an
attempt to get something done about it. 


PS: Joel Rappaport says APSCO is (just) now stocking direct replacements for
the old M&H agraffes. That would be 9/32 x 34tpi by my old samples. Only
about two weeks too late for this project, but something to remember for the
next one. 

PPS: Tom Cole, thanks for the offer of your old take-outs, but I have some
of my own now. And no, you still can't throw yours away. Sorry.

 Ron