johnh wrote:If the Rodgers uses silver wire contacts you might want to read Clinton Knight's discussion of same:
...
---john.
Rodgers never used silver contacts that I am aware of, and I worked on them for 30 years.
The whisker contacts are gold filled bronze wire, and the buss bar is also gold filled.
Gold filled means not very much gold, just enough to fill the slight dimples on the
surface of the metal that it is applied to.
The good news is that in addition to the natural wiping action that keeps dust out, and the
redundancy of using two whiskers (wired together) for each note, the gold makes an
excellent contact, and even when it tarnishes or corrodes it has very low resistance.
The bad news is that sometimes the little whiskers will break off. The worst case happens
sometimes when it just starts to break off but just falls down on the contact rail
causing a cipher. Even with that, I thought that it was overall an excellent system.
Rodgers used to sell individual contact wires for replacement, or even a whole circuit
board which has if I remember correctly about half a keyboard worth of contacts.
Good luck with your conversion. I also recently bought an old Rodgers 32-C which I
am gutting, and I plan to use the encoders from Roman Sawa.
Steve T
(now in Oregon, but used to be in DC)