Just when we thought this topic had been exhausted...my apologies for not having read HPSCHD-L for the past month.

On the subject of Vince Ho's Italian mk.I - guilty as charged, I was the "restorer" back in 2013-4. And "restorer" 
in quotes, as the instrument had never been in a playable or restorable state to begin with. Probably because 
of inattentiveness to RH when building and installing the soundboard, there was a split pretty much the entire 
length of the board, coincident to the position of the bridge miter in the bass. Fixing that took some doing 
(partial removal of one rib and complete removal of the short bridge and short tail rib included, before reattaching 
and shimming the nearly-five-foot-long crack), and for that reason alone I would caution against raising the 
pitch to a'=440 on this instrument.

As to gap spacers, if one is bent on reinventing the wheel, there is always another convoluted way! The "hollow" 
wrestplank is actually an L-shaped cross-section. According to the builder's manual that came with the instrument 
- the kit was dated 1977 - DJ Way had prototyped one or two of these in the Zuckermann shop with a wrestplank 
cross-section that was a narrow vertical column, maybe 1.5" wide, and these imploded when strung up. Subsequently,
the kits came with a "wrestplank stiffener" that was to be glued onto the main wrestplank by the kit builder, flush with
the bottom edge of the wrestplank and facing towards the gap. The bottom face of the "stiffener" sat about .300" 
lower than the bottom faces of the registers, just enough space for this fan of McMaster-Carr to slip a 1/4"-20 stainless
threaded rod and a large thumbscrew for adjusting to the exact width of the gap. I also nailed a stainless wedge to
the bellyrail, centered on the knee that supports the belly rail against the case bottom, for the threaded rod to bear 
against so that it wouldn't eat into the soft wood of the belly rail. (Why a wedge? To accommodate the angle between
the angled gap and the wrestplank.) Vince can correct me, but the instrument was relatively stable when restrung and
never had a problem with the registers freezing (I also made and installed register levers, which is another story entirely).

Sorry for the verbosity - hopefully there's something worth reading in there for the owners of these instruments, which
I think have some of the highest expressive potential of all the ZHI kits made to date.

Eugene

P.S.: On the "Agents of Chaos" tour - I believe I might be the present owner of that instrument, of which I recall Owen 
or maybe Dr Calhoun saying that it lived in a San José church at the time of their service visit. It's got a sloppily installed
gap spacer and all the strings starting with that spacer and ending nearly all the way at the bass are much newer than
those in the treble. :) Incidentally, that instrument now happily lives at rock-solid-stable a'=440, owing not to a rescaling 
but to the fact that the treble keys c#''' and d''' were moved to the bass...

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