Pt# 3744 Premier 701/751 Note peg caps

It has taken a long time to try and find a workable solution to return the Premier note peg caps back into production.  Below there is a potted history that you may or not want to read.  However you do need to read the bit below:

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To my knowledge, Premier produced five different versions of this component, all with the same part number.  Each of these versions have different dimensions.  Within the same early versions, there was a wide tolerance.  When I redesigned the part I had to make a decision over the playing height.  It was a compromise anyway, so I made the value a simple number.  The consequence is that the parts I make may not match the parts you have on your instrument.

My parts are 0.13mm taller than the latest version, but 0.25mm shorter than the previous version.  This is a small gap and everything might be fine, but depending on your instrument and how you play, it is enough of a gap to cause a damping delay.  The solution would be to change all of the caps on the inner two rails so that you know they are all the same height.  Furthermore this would also take full advantage of the design change to the cord aperture which I have been experimenting with.  This modification is designed to improve damping.  You should not have a damping problem on a well set up instrument, but if you do, this design change should help.

Ordering:

Send me an Email including your name, address and quantity required.  Nowadays you also need to include your mobile phone number.  It is often a mandatory requirement of the courier to make a booking.  I will reply with a proforma invoice which has all the payment details.

History:

When Premier closed their factory, I obtained the moulds to produce these parts.  I approached the injection moulding company to get a quote to have more made, but the cost was prohibitive because the moulds required old technology.  The solution was to make moulds and produce the parts myself.  I did this for many years producing a few thousand parts.

Eventually these version 1 moulds, being a soft moulding silicone became worn and I needed to update them.  This is the time when I reassess the process and address any problems that I encounter when making the parts.  The first problem being that the materials I used became considerably harder to get in small quantities and the shelf life of the product made large quantities unviable.

Meanwhile I had been having much better success using silicone rubber to make the components I need.  So I produced the version two moulds to make these parts in the same way.  The problems I encountered were two-fold; the surface finish needed to be better and more seriously, there were curing issues due to the small size of the component.

These problems were solved quite quickly by redesigning the part and producing a new mould design.  Mould version 3 had a few tweaks applied to it before the production problems required a version 4 to be designed.  This also had a few minor changes, then version 5 came and went and then version 6.  This is where semantics come in.  The problem was never “making” the parts, the problem was “producing” the parts.  I can make the parts quite easily, but I couldn’t reliably produce them initially because I could no longer get the materials.  All of these different mould versions made the parts, they had to because I needed peg caps to fix instruments, but I couldn’t produce them because they simply took way too long to make.

All this time I have been looking at the problem, assessing components and having lengthy discussions with a good friend of mine.  He is incredibly knowledgeable about all sorts of stuff and our problem solving minds compliment each other.  It is his machinery that now makes the version 7s.  We went a completely different route and just started again from the ground up, starting with looking at different materials we could use, quantifying loads and application requirements.  It took a few different iterations of the version 7s to address the nuances of production mainly concerned with the reduction of material wastage.  A small batch was then made for real world trials as well as a series of destructive tests assessing durability.  The parts are still quite labour intensive to produce, primarily because the design is deceptively complex, and uncured material needs to be removed, but we have finally got them back into production and with all the design improvements.