Magnetic Coverplates for the Seydel 1847 or other sandwich style harmonicas

[dominico]

Over the last week I've been putting together a "slipslider" style harmonica on the Seydel 1847 platform. I'll do a separate thread dedicated to that.

One challenge I needed to overcome immediately is how to hold the drawplate coverplate on while still allowing the drawplate to slide. I needed a magnetic coverscrew where I could choose the depth it would go into the coverplate screw hole. Then I thought, well, magnetic coverplates would be a good thing to have in general.

So I've been playing around with a few different ways to get magnetic coverplates onto my Seydel 1847s.

The simplest way I thought to do it was to get some M2 barrel spacers or sexbolts of the correct length and simply glue a 3mm magnet to the ends.
I then decided it would be quicker for me to just 3D print some inserts and glue magnets to them! So that's what I did...

They work reasonably well. There are a couple of things I could improve, but they hold the coverplates on.

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My next thought was that maybe they would hold better if there were magnets embedded into the comb. So I created a version of the comb with 8 magnet pockets, 4 on each side, to embed magnets into the comb. The pockets are separated by 1mm of material, so I don't have to have the holes to "press-fit" tolerances but the magnets still stay in place.
I then added press-fit pockets to my magnetic inserts.

Now the coverplate "magnet inserts" stay in place better and don't get out of sorts when you fully remove the coverplate. The only problem is that this solution uses three times as many magnets, but is necessary for my current attempt at the slipslider design.

This allowed me to create 8mm and 2mm versions of my "magnetic coverplate screws", keeping my slipslider coverplates on.

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[dominico]

Here is a shot of my seydel slipslider comb with the embedded magnets. These pockets can be added to a normal comb as well, I'll show more photos when I print a few more.

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