Well, had a minor disaster just now… err… an hour and a half ago.

I had most of the cleanable joints sanded to bare brass, so everything was ready for buffing. Then I was going to reassemble and re-re-align the two rotors.

The the only thing left to do would have been to make two new linkage rods ...

Ready for some cleanup work. Most of the mess is from when I installed the 6th valve. I had to solder all of that mess together in high winds outside; it was… disheartening. So today and tomorrow I will clean it up. And then I will smile.

I still have to get a meter stick of the tubing needed for ...

BUMP!

Tony, I am at that point in my career, too. I was in love with the sound of my Holton 345, and it had very decent intonation, especially for such a large tuba. It also had a very decent low register. I loved that thing. However, my joints are giving me problems: knees, hips, ankles, spine ...

I did that. It was WAY off for this tuba. It needed to be a 35.5-ish" loop rather than the 24.5-ish" loop the math (and my CC tubas) would indicate.

Again, this was the case for me with my Mirafone 180's 4th slide: it had to be *much* longer, and then it was more or less great.

Not so with my ...

Yeah, right now it is garbage for a lot of the things I might ever need it for --- laughably so in the case of Finale or music engraving practices.

However, it is really great for math and science, until it isn't.

I still cannot figure out how it got to the same, exact answer as me, using the ...

The MTS is more or less done. I have to install the waterkey bracket and nipple. I also want to trim the small side inner tube by the smount shown in the photo so that the other side seats fully when the slide is in all the way. (Stuff like that bugs me.)

Also, once I have it wired down, I need to ...

Well, everything went wrong today. HAHAHA!!! (I am working on laughing when things don't work out, rather than stressing and cussing.)

I won't go into what did NOT work. Rather, I ended up completely disassembling the main tuning slide and its two outer tubes from the tuba.

I cleaned up ...

Just tossing stuff together to set up the space where everything needs to live. Most joints are only half-filled, and are super sloppy due to the wicked trembling in my hands (f-ing meds).

Once it is all dialed in, I will take it all down, clean it up, and very carefully solder it together, both ...

Will do, Chief.

PS - It's not.

Here is a set of parts for Edwards trombones that you can probably buy from Getzen. Above, I noted that it depends on who answers the phone. I meant that sometimes they are willing to look up all the part numbers and diagrams and pull them from parts bins, and sometimes they are "busy".

Having ...

The two large detachable braces between the outer 4th slide tube and the top bow (and two more on the other side) are an Instrument Innovations bass trombone bell brace three-piece barrell socket, some stainless steel rod, a King socketed brace foot on top, and the I.I. socket silver-soldered to ...

Instrument Innovations (still a good bet)
Interesting stuff here—> linky

Yamaha (meh)

Getzen/Edwards (depends on who answers the phone)
no current contact info

Kanstul (well, nope, not any more)

Conn-Selmer (less likely these days)

homemade (time-consuming, but if you have the tooling and ...

That Yamaha union got a short write-up last year when I first decided to use it on the Kurath. I had planned to add a 6th valve to my Holton 345, and would have used this union as a part of that project. However, I ended up dumping the whole idea. For the Kurath, it was far too large, and the one ...

Okay, so the complete rebuild of the rotary valve section has begun. The goal is to adjust the 5th and 6th slides to where I have determined I want them to be, to finalize a bunch of angles, and to make the rotary section removable from the piston without weakening anything.

To accomplish the last ...

We seem to be talking a lot about the bumper material here. Like, most of the replies have been about what you can use.

This is supposed to be about how I overlooked the valve alignment on my own instrument, thinking that it was a small leak.

Like for a long time.

I guess I did not make that ...

I had a Sears trumpet in 7th grade. The case said Sears, but the bell was stamped "LARK". It was the epitome of "Chinese" workmanship from 1977.

Nothing worked. Everything broke. It has ZAMAK waterkeys and a 3rd slide adjustment ring, and a ZAMAK brace that melted when a tech tried to reattach it ...

I have plenty of the stuff here. The issue with Miraphone's chosen neoprene is that it is very hard, so difficult to compress into the cork plates. Then you *still* have to trim them. You know, after all these years, you would think they would know the compression/"bulge" factor and use material ...

Nice. I would like to find out about the gig bag Yamaha makes for these. Mine did not come with a case or bag. I have both now, but a bag sized specifically for one of these would be nice to have… if it is a really good design…