Maintenance of the Auris glockenspiel
The brass tones
The Auris glockenspiel has tones made of a brass alloy and a wooden body of maple wood.
The tone bars are coated with a fine layer of bees wax and nothing else. The bees wax
provides a mild, natural gloss of the brass. It also allows you to restore the
shining surface yourself, when it gets darker over time or for any other reason looses
its brightness through stains or scratches for example.
The easiest way to do this is with a regular metal polish or polish wadding, that you
can find in any drugstore or supermarket. Thereafter you can give it some wax again onto the bars and rub it smoothly with a soft cloth to protect the new shining surface longer.
The well maintained surface will in this way get aged with a noble patina and look better
the more it is used.
Scratches
Even scratches in the metal are possible to take care of. For this purpose, use very fine
steel wool. You must be very careful to move the wool EXACTLY ALONG the direction
of the tone bar. Start f the process with a light pressure to see if the wool you’ve chosen
gives a structure similar to the original.
The wood
The wooden part has shellac priming and is finished with a wax polish. This gives a
soft very “woody” feeling and is easy to protect and preserve. If there are no marks
or stains on the wooden body and you just want to shine it up a little, rub it with some
beeswax or wood polish on a rough cloth – let this dry and polish with a smooth cloth.
Notches
A deep mark in the wood can be levelled out by wetting it and as it is still wet, work it
over with a hot iron. This causes the compressed wood in the notch to swell up. If the
mark still is not fully in level you can repeat the procedure a couple of times, if the
wood gets slightly burned you can easily remove superficial burn marks with a grinding paper.
After grinding the surface smooth you finish it with wax as described above.
Marks from wax crayons can be resolved by turpentine.
We wish you many joy full moments with your instrument
The staff at AURIS Musikinstrument, Järna, Sweden
www.auris.se