Don't try to understand 'em; Just rope an' throw an' brand 'em

[bloke]

My customer just got lucky. The third piston on this expensive brand marching baritone (the one that still nickel plates their pistons) I discovered tonight was bent near the top of the piston.
I was actually able to turn down the flaw without going through the nickel plating, and then end up with a smooth surface. This customer must have some karma or something...(??)

Typically, I fly through marching baritones, but this is one of those makes where the materials and workmanship (ok: in my opinion) don't meet up with the tolerances (nor the price or reputation) and the light touch that are designed into the instruments, so they have to be monkeyed with even when they're really not broken. Thus, they try my patience. I had about eleven of these to do, went through four of them, and I'm going to bed. Well ... it is 11:00 p.m. after all, but mostly I didn't want to lose my patience with these things.

I guess I could have dug into these earlier, but I don't get this motivated on weekends as I do on weekdays for whatever reason, and I did sandwich in that other school and put their sousaphone back together as well as straightening yet another bent piston on yet another high priced Asian brand marching instrument. Also, just about this time each summer I start getting a bit burned out, which luckily just about lines up with getting through all these piles of instruments each summer.
... I haven't mowed these acres even once, and there's other stuff around here that needs repair (non musical instrument stuff that belongs to us) which is totally being ignored.

[bloke]

Marching baritones are done.

I need to contact a sousaphone manufacturer about a possible warranty issue. This instrument is only a year old and what I have to deal with, I shouldn't be having to deal with.

Once I've done that in the morning, this big big stack of instruments for this university is done.

[bloke]

I started on the Community College tubas. I pulled a 641 with stuck rotors, stuck slides, and a big juicy dent on the far back corner of the bottom bow along with those stupid hard to reach valve section attaching screw braces that were rattling. It's repaired to reasonably good condition and back in the case. That's the only one I did today. I'm just a little tired, and I had to do a bunch of paperwork. It's funny how paperwork gets me more tired than horns, sometimes. Another thing that tires me is driving. If I drive all over creation picking up or delivering - and I'm out for 4 to 6 hours being nice and doing a lot of driving - that's exhausting.

I had to help Mrs bloke with an Accent knockoff of a Buffet clarinet, today. One of the posts on the upper joint A key was screwed up too badly to repair and she kept trying to fix it, bless her heart. I went up in the attic and pulled down a big sack of clarinet upper joints, and we went through them. We had to find one that had the a key working off of a needle spring off of that post rather than a flat spring off of the key itself. She was the first one to find one, but its spring was too short. I found some .025 steel spring wire and set it up for her. She was sort of emotionally exhausted trying to make the original work. It's in the case now playing well, and she even got two more instruments (bass clarinets) past that one repaired.

While I was chem-cleaning that funky old Yamaha rotary tuba, I did some more hand polishing (ie. "ragging") on that 22K valve section. It's looking better and better. If I have more down time or process wait time on other repairs like that, it's going to end up being ready to polish with jewelers red rouge, and then ready to shoot with clear. It's interesting about trying to polish every possible area with the buffing machine before hand ragging. One gets into the ragging process and sees a few areas where they can go back and actually get the buffing machine onto some surfaces that hit previously didn't occur to them that they could get the wheel to contact. It's a little bit of back and forth each time there's an item like this that needs both extensive machine buffing and hand polishing.

She also fixed a piccolo earlier today.

I sort of forgot also that a local customer brought one of those Chinese B&S C tuba's here for me to repair. It's the so-called "International" version of that 4/4 instrument that they used to claim was like a York 4/4 (the one which does NOT have a fourth valve slide at the top). Some of you know the nomenclature of that model, but - again - this is the Chinese version. They used to put "Besson" on all this stuff, but this one just has the German B&S logo on it.

His complaint is that the first two valves are sluggish, but they never stick. I'm pretty sure that what's going on is that he's greasing the slides a lot and the grease is migrating. He's particularly greasing the #1 slide, because the alignment is off over 10/1000th of an inch from one end to the other, so I'm going to align that slide in order for him to be able to lubricate it with valve oil instead of slide grease. Additionally, I'm going to vent the #1 piston. Grandma was worried that might void the warranty, and pointed out a two or three small dents that are already in it and said that if the valves weren't working that those were enough for someone to quibble and claim that the shock of being knocked against things causes the valve to stick. LOL. The fifth rotor is also grindy. It's probably got lime deposits in it or maybe it's just slightly Chinesy. I'll find out.

This is a talented young man whose parents abandoned him. He's smart as a whip and I really fine freshman college tuba player. I'm sure grandma is proud of him. I told him that he could follow his dream, or he could work on both a music education degree and also learn how to fix air conditioners or something (so he can make some decent money). I pointed out to him that the actual dollars paid for performing have decreased over the last several years, and aren't that much more than they were a couple of decades ago if not actually less, and teacher pay hasn't gone up very much at all either. He's going to think about it.

He played my cimbasso, got a good controlled sound right off the bat. More impressively, he didn't try to blast noise out of it.

[bloke]

The recurring theme that I find ironic is that when I grew up there was emphasis on individual responsibility and individual consequences for individual decisions. This contrasts with today where the emphasis is on the collective and everything being owned by all of us, etc.

That having been said, with all of this emphasis on the fact that we all own these things, the individuals who use things that we all own treat them like they don't own them at all and tear them up, fail to maintain them, let them get rained on, or whatever.

Eloi

[gocsick]

The recurring theme that I find ironic is that when I grew up there was emphasis on individual responsibility and individual consequences for individual decisions. This contrasts with today where the emphasis is on the collective and everything being owned by all of us, etc.

That having been said, with all of this emphasis on the fact that we all own these things, the individuals who use things that we all own treat them like they don't own them at all and tear them up, fail to maintain them, let them get rained on, or whatever.

Environmentalists refer to that concept as "The tragedy of the commons" . The name was climbed by an ecologist Garrett Hardin but the idea goes easy back to antiquity. We take care of our stuff but connective screw up our stuff.

[bloke]

The recurring theme that I find ironic is that when I grew up there was emphasis on individual responsibility and individual consequences for individual decisions. This contrasts with today where the emphasis is on the collective and everything being owned by all of us, etc.

That having been said, with all of this emphasis on the fact that we all own these things, the individuals who use things that we all own treat them like they don't own them at all and tear them up, fail to maintain them, let them get rained on, or whatever.

Environmentalists refer to that concept as "The tragedy of the commons" . The name was climbed by an ecologist Garrett Hardin but the idea goes easy back to antiquity. We take care of our stuff but connective screw up our stuff.

Yeah...
We had some worn-out and some outdated stuff at our poor redneck school in the late 60's into the 70's, but no torn-up stuff.
When anyone (even barely) bumped something around, they were (not scolded by the director, but) shunned by the other band members - at least for several days.
One of those under-engineered diamond braces (3rd slide to 4th branch) came loose on my 36K fiberglass sousaphone once, so I immediately took it home and my Dad and I soldered it back together, sanded off the burned lacquer, managed to find some 600 grit paper (to smooth the repair down a bit better), and put some clear finish over the spot. ...I was really worried. (The instrument was about six years old.)

[bloke]

officially done with "school repairs" (middle, high, college, university) and three days prior to August.
I went out after "dinner" (two hard boiled eggs, salad, and chicken soup) and ran through the "box" instruments (which I always save for last with any school, because they're always the easiest). This college's "box" instrument repairs only consisted of a marching mellophone and marching baritone.
again: "box" because their cases are box-shaped.

Now...to friggin' WAIT on the damn dough...