Ah, Rebecca - for a stamped envelope I will send you the tale of
two recent instruments made transposing beyond their plans; one
of them the "Hemsch" aforementioned, amidst much smoke and stink
from a borrowed dull table saw, and the other a bit Italian which
already transposed but which was too long of scale, by a half-tone,
to go get to 440 in brass and so was strung in most uninteresting-
sounding steel. That one involved the only thing I could find to
borrow, an industrial-strength sabre saw ... !
 
Not knowing your Gough, I can't really say for sure, but chances
are that it could be made transposible without too much violence
either to the mechanism or to the cosmetics. Why not bring the
keyboards by, and we'll talk about it.
 
Seriously - I too have noticed that, even when one carefully levels
both key heads and key tails to make the transposition even, the
leverage, or the _experience_ of the leverage to the fingers, seems
to be different on naturals and on accidentals, and to confuse things
when the keyboard's slud over. Personally, for voicing I like to
tune ET and listen in both keyboard positions, playing lots of
whole-tone scales, to try to refine things out. For regulating,
I've sometimes set all the naturals, then slid the keys over and
done the naturals again, on the theory that (a) I can feel the
details of the stagger better when I can get a thimb under the
key head, and (2) that my fingers tend to whack the sharps harder
than the naturals, and thus to be less sensitive to nuance on the
accidentals.
 
Mr.J: would one really be distorting the aesthetics of the keyboard
if one juggled the fulcra so that the naturals and accidentals did
have the same mechanical advantage - or disadvantage?
 
                                                        calhoun