Hubbard and Dowd adopted a modern synthetic, Delrin, for plectra because it sounded closer to antique quill than the leather then in use

The ivory-passport capture recorded a jack/plectrum "quill versus Delrin" mechanism with no source at all, and it was held back from promotion for that reason. Palmer's chapter supplies it: "David Fuller's Taskin model, Hubbard and Dowd number fifty-five, was the first of the firm's instruments to have Delrin plastic plectra. The partners had discovered that this synthetic material produced a sound similar to that made by quill in antique instruments."

The choice sits inside a live mid-century argument. Dowd named "the three great controversies" of the period as "the sixteen-foot choir, quill versus leather, and pedals" — and on all three the historically-minded builders won by attrition. The 16-foot stop, the compensating device the heavy metal-framed revival instruments had needed to stay audible, "was not offered in Dowd harpsichords after the earliest unsuccessful experiments, and it was gone from the instruments of most other builders by 1970." Pedals Dowd would still build "if one insisted on them," but he "used his considerable skills to talk his customers out of the idea."

The interesting part is that the authenticity argument was won with a plastic. Delrin is a mid-twentieth-century industrial synthetic — no eighteenth-century builder could have had it, and it is precisely as anachronistic as the aluminium frames and plywood cases the same movement was busy discarding. It was adopted anyway, because the target was the sound of quill rather than the material of quill. The only concession to historical material was "an occasional instrument with a soft buffalo leather peau de buffle stop added."

That distinction — reconstructing a result rather than a substance — is what separates this from a naive return-to-origins story, and it complicates the clean reversal narrative in claim-historical-light-construction-displaced-piano-frame-harpsichord-building-by-late-20th-century. Historically-informed performance is not the rejection of modern materials; it is the subordination of material choice to an evidentiary target.