In 1982 I visited the Bachhaus and was quite surprised to find a 
delightfully small rustic harpsichord sitting on a small rustic table. 
It had recently been restored to playing and Its tonal charaterictic was 
much more like a virginal not because of the live wrestplank but because 
of the high pluck points. Since the main purpose of the trip to (then 
East_) Germany was to see and measure germanic examples, I made a 
rubbing of the soundboard and noted such unusual features such as 
exposed tenons showing the inner construction through the outer case 
walls. The inst was painted a dark redbrown. It had two unisons and a 4 
oct. keyboard which slide to the right two semitones. All this was very 
unusual to me then.as I was expecting some "german charcteristics". My 
client who accompanied me wound up choosing this as a model for an 
instrument which I delivered somewhere around 1992. One thing I 
remembered just now was the heavy walled dovetailed case with a rather 
sharp curve in the treble. The scale was too long for brass at modern 
pitch and a bit short for iron. But then Voss wire wasn't known then. 
What was so strange was that as close as the copy was to the tone of the 
original, no one knew what to play on it. I also lost track of the inst 
and the owner. I do also remember that of all the instruments seen on 
the trip, the best sounding was a new copy by Frau Ammer of the circa 
1700 Harass which I personally didn't see but which came back as photos 
and a cassette tape from my travelling companion. If I knew what I know 
now, I would have quiickly designed a smaller version of this humongous 
instrument and sold it as a "Bach Instrument". But thise were my "copy 
days". It's not too strange that a name like Ammer would come back as 
one of the better builders today.  JP