Holton 345 Redux

[the elephant]

[the elephant]

Wow, a language barrier, even a small one, can be nearly insurmountable when ordering custom-made parts.

That's my Monday Rant for August 24, 2020.

[the elephant]

Today I finally got around to correcting the three large detachable braces, including removing the socket and resetting it on one of them, (It was off-center.)

I also built the three additional small detachable brace sockets using the King braces with the sockets Dremeled off.

No gaps in any of them this time. Everything is pretty darned straight. I am pleased. I am also beat from my walk this morning and then sitting outside silver soldering. That means that I just wanted to finish and failed to take photos. (Besides, they would have looked like the previous ones.)

Moving ahead, just the same.

[the elephant]

Oh, heck, here are some nice reminders from the previous page so you can remember exactly what I did today.

I made three more of these.






And now I have five of these…


And none of these…

[prairieboy1]

[cjk]

We are now braced for future updates.

[LeMark]

We are now braced for future updates.

[the elephant]

[bloke]

Holton body geometry is often "screwy"...particularly (whether-or-not "cut") with the C instruments.

I had two B-flat's - awhile back, side-by-side - never taken apart - that were an inch different in overall height.

What you've done with that instrument appears to be the "best possible solution" and (yup) time to get on with it.

[the elephant]

WARNING: Like the post I made in my 186 thread today, this is a technical post with little to do except explain what is going to be happening soon and has no report of new work. It is an announcement of the resurrection of a dormant project and will be followed up with photos of progress starting in a couple of weeks, perhaps the end of March. If you just want to see the pretty pictures then you can skip this post. But when it starts popping up every day again you may want to tune back in.
____________________

Okay, so when this horn pops back up on the workbench in the next two weeks I will be taking the whole valve section apart again. The whole thing. That I struggled with for months. Apart.



However, I own some much better tools now, and I have been able to incorporate back into my work some very old, atrophied skills. There are a few things about that valve section that have bugged me for a long time — personal disappointments after so much good work — that I intend to do the whole thing over. I now know how to calculate a few things more accurately and finally have my silver soldering and dent machine skills back to where I am no longer stressed about that sort of work.

The incorporation of Miraphone 186 slide tubing and crooks really allowed me to do what I was unable to do the first time I rebuilt the valve section years ago using tubing from Allied and the B&M crooks that came with the tuba. However, the lower third crook I chose (the 5th crook from a 186), while only being a quarter of an inch wider than the B&M original, needed to have the knuckle on the valve cut off and extended, and I was quite proud of what I managed to do. Of course, much later down the road I noticed old photos of this tuba's 3rd slide and saw how differently clocked that slide was now. It did not seem to matter back then, but now that I am about to put the valve section onto the bugle I see that it will not allow me to use the 4th slide routing that I had worked hard to come up with.

Because of course this would happen to me. Heh, heh, heh…

My plan is to remove the cut knuckle, realign the lower slide, and then cut a slightly longer knuckle and align it better to the slide. BOOM. Happiness.
I have never been pleased with the action of my 2nd slide. The tubing I used was slightly misshapen, so even after considerable lapping, it is still difficult to pull. Add to that the fact that right now there is a tiny misalignment that on such a short slide and the action sort of sucks, to be honest. So that will receive new tubing and a handmade brace of the correct spread.

Actually, both of the braces between the upper 1st and 3rd slides and the 2nd will be scratch-made. Hooray, skill set counter-atrophication! I can properly address all the little things that I had to let slide because they, in reality, were not little things for me at that time.

I also want to work on my goofy tube end bands. They are eye candy, to a certain extent, but I really like such things at they reinforce the outer slide tube ends. I have had bad luck with a few tubas with bare slide tube ends, so these will be a boon for this tuba. However, I did not own a lathe when I made and installed them.

Also, many of my slide tube sets are very close to being perfectly flat and level, but I had to eyeball every, last one of them. In my current situation, I can do this sort of task much more accurately, as in perfect within a few thou. My lathe has been carefully gone over, cleaned up, repaired, and finally: adjusted. I can use it. I have not done anything with it yet, but that will change by Easter, I think.

I look at photos of this horn and see all this mess that I was proud of when it was that good using a broken screwdriver and duct tape. But it needs to be better now that I can make that happen.

One thing that I have not talked about much in the past is a rather vain or silly thing. I like my horns to match as though they are part of a set. This has happened in the past by accident, and I decided that I liked it. I have also developed a very specific look that I want, and now all my horns will share this, once I do a bunch of learning and practicing with some new tools I recently picked up.

I have been practicing with my dent machine "guard wheels" and have become fairly proficient with them. Soon I should be able to fashion a top bow guard from the badly damaged, castoff bottom bow guard from my cut 186. Then I have to locate the correctly-sized nickel silver sheet for my bottom bow guard. I intend to copy the one that is there and to imitate that pattern for the top bow since the Holton only has a guard wire on the top bow right now. I believe that this will be a fun project to work on.

I have also decided to more carefully leak test the piston set. If I take the valve section all the way down again, and the piston fit is not excellent, then I'll probably make an appointment to send them to Dan Oberloh. This would, of course, set my project back very far and cost me a lot of money, so I have to test the valves and think about this carefully. This horn is a long-term keeper, so it would be stupid of me to have the valves free of the horn (and easily shippable) and *not* get this work done if it is needed.

So after all that work, I am taking the valve section completely apart again.

<sigh…>

It will be good to get back to work on this horn and finally finish it. I *miss* playing it in the orchestra!

[The Big Ben]

Carry on!

[prairieboy1]

Carry on!

+1

[the elephant]

Recently, I have been studying photos from 2006 up through about 2009 before I had done anything to my Holton. I have mostly been studying slide alignment and how the valve section "sat" on the bugle. These have changed over time, as I have altered things. Now I find that I have allowed things to shift around to where they fit better until you try to fit a leadpipe to the horn, so I am researching to find (and mark) a bunch of reference points and trace their progression across the bugle inner branches.

The valve section has slowly moved farther from the bell side of the horn, and my latest iteration of the bugle mocked up with the latest iteration of the valve section will force me to use a too-long leadpipe, making the horn unplayably flat. (Mr. Rusk chopped out every bit of tuba he could to make this horn work, and the leadpipe was an acoustical nightmare because of it. The MTS was also stupid-short, IMHO.

The first time I rebuilt part of the horn involved giving it a completely new 4th slide circuit so that two of the bottom valve caps would no longer be inaccessible. (Why someone would intentionally design in a problem like this is beyond me, but that is how he did it on this horn. I suspect he was as unhappy with it as I was, but he was selling it, not servicing it.) When I did this initial work I also repositioned the valves on the bugle to allow me to dump his homemade MTS crook and dogleg, which were not good. I also needed to create a space where I could relocate the 5th valve at some future date.

THIS was the location for which I bent my leadpipe, which worked much better than his. I am not "educated" in leadpipe optimization voodoo, but I can make one that works well enough, that fits well, and looks good, too. And in this case, I liked the one I made enough to try to locate the valve section to allow me to either reuse it or make a new one that is very close to it.

I had introduced another new MTS crook that I was very excited about, acoustically. It matched taper rate with everything behind it and my leadpipe just about perfectly. Unfortunately, when combined with other changes, this would make the horn 3" too long with the MTS all the way in, and I did not want another 2" MTS!

I had to go back to the middle MTS crook, the first one I swapped in, which came off of a 1931 York BBb sousaphone. It worked very well, and it would allow me to move the valve section over toward the bell so that my old leadpipe would fit. One other change would allow me to have a horn that was the same length as it had been for many years and that I liked.

Great!

Except that my new 5th valve slide location would no longer work, and I *really* needed that modification to happen. I was very unhappy with the previous slide had had to be routed out of spatial necessity.

So I had to make some decisions and ended up spending a lot of unbudgeted money on a box of parts from my friends in Waldkraiburg. With this series of "pop-up problems" solved I was ready to get back to work.

This is where I am now.

So, this past week the photo research was to confirm that things in this final version of the valve section line up well enough to allow the same placement on the bugle that I worked out last time, as I said above. I was concerned that my 3rd slide was canted too low, that the 2nd side was screwed up, alignment-wise, and several other issues.

And today I tore it all apart and examined angles and such next to some huge, lifesized photos on my Big-as$™ iMac monitor. The 3rd slide is almost exactly where it had been prior to switching over to wider crooks and cutting off and extending one of the valve knuckles; I had done much better in that than I had thought. (I paid myself an additional valueless US dollar for that one.)

Then I worked on the 2nd slide. I suspect that when I opened up the two knuckles to better fit the new side tubing (from 19 mm to 19.5-ish) that one (or both) of them opened up more to one side than the other, effectively altering the exact distance between the two ports by a tiny bit, while the radius of the 2nd crook may have changed in a different direction. this would make it very hard to get the two side leg sets perfect coplanar and parallel. Even without the brace between the two tubes it no longer works as well as it did before I changed to the larger tubing set.

Also, the 2nd slide, through some moronic oversight, never got new inner tubing when I switched from brass inners to nickel silver. I have like eleventy million sides on this tuba, all NS-to-NS except for this one.

Tonight I took the 2nd slide apart, cut new inner legs and ferrules, and removed the outer legs from the valve casing. I will try very hard to get the ends of the crook and the two knuckle ends to mate up perfectly, then I will build/align my slide and solder the outers back to the valve.

It was a very small step after such a long hiatus, but it was a step nonetheless, so I'm happy.

This is how the 3rd slide fit the valves when I got the horn (and it was still silver plated). Currently, 3rd is like three millimeters lower, so that is close enough. Both slides work well, and there is adequate room for my two water key additions. This shot is from the bottom, so the third is the higher one with the water key.



Same, but from the top, so third is the top, left.



New and old 2nd slide legs and ferrules…

[York-aholic]

Forward progress. Very good!

[prairieboy1]

Great news! Keep posting!

[the elephant]

That post was mostly for my own motivation. I am covered from head to toe with poison ivy blisters, so doing much of *anything* is a PITA for me right now. I am about a week into this reaction, so probably two more, maybe three. Diabetes makes the outbreaks horrible and very long-asting. Also, we have had some tornado weather and a lot of rain, and now it is perfect, except that it is in the high 40s or low 50s at best, and I work outdoors, of necessity.

I did nothing today because I have felt so poorly with these confusticated blisters making every physical motion sort of suck for me.

Anyway, the temp will be in the mid 60º range tomorrow, with neither wind nor rain, so that 2nd slide comes off the valve section. I have discoered that one of the two outer tubes is a little ovalized in the middle from the brace. (Okay, maybe I did a *little* work.) So tomorrow will see two new outer tubes cut and cleaned up. Then I will try to see whether I can correct the small discrepancy between the ends of the crook and the two knuckles on the casing. If I can correct that small fault my 2nd slide ought to be movable with one finger in the pull ring.

Thanks to you guys for your words of encouragement. They help keep me focused when I have "issues" with the weather or my health acting as a barrier to my getting work done. Please keep any comments or discussion going.

[prairieboy1]

Your perseverance with this project is very laudable and your standards high. Keep up the great work and know that those of us who are following along with your posts and photos are doing so with great interest. Keep up the terrific work and look after yourself as well!

[the elephant]

Today I made a new 2nd slide. It is not finished, nor have the old outer tubes been removed from the valve casing set. First I wanted to see whether newer (and rounder) inner legs would help the mediocre action. I had to swap them from brass to nickel silver because I forgot to do so in the past.

The result is that the new slide binds in the same location, just a bit less bad. So that was a bit of a fail, but as in the automotive repair world: diagnose, then try the EASIEST and LEAST EXPENSIVE solution, first. I had to make new inner legs, I lined the slide up really well (with the tools I use for that that I purchased well after I made this slide the first time). It is *straight* now. So the answer is that the brace is too "tall" (by about six thousandths of an inch, which on this short of a slide would make a rather unhappy bend in both outer tubes) or one of the two knuckles I expanded did so unevenly so that the two ports on the casing are too close together now (by the same measurement of about .006" (or thereabouts).

Six thousandths is a large amount to be out by on such a short slide. I am embarrassed that I failed to catch this before, but that was prior to my having a more accurate means to line these parts up. At least the slide is spot on now. I can adjust the knuckle now that I know what the issue is. (Ahem, AFTER I measure the brace, that is…)

Okay, so now it matches all the other slides on the tuba. Nice. However, it has the same mediocre action, binding about 2/3 of the way in.


My answer to this was to cut and fit two new outer tubes. I worked on my Proxxon mini miter saw for about an hour today, and the cutting angle is much closer to being true, now.


The new 2nd slide assembly looks pretty decent to me…


The last thing I got to before quitting for tonight was to install some of my tube end rings, which reinforce the end and give the outer tubes a more finished look. Tomorrow I might make a new brace for this assembly — I don't trust the one I have been using. Then I will remove the old outer slide from the valves and work on lining stuff up better.

[the elephant]

I finished my 2nd slide assembly just now and made this 13-second video. My goal was to have a slide that, without leaking, had the action of a very well-aligned 1st slide with no leaks. I intend to use a slightly heavier oil on this than on the 1st slide. On this tuba low B has always been flat with 2nd all the way in. I do not really have to move that slide other than when I have to hammer a low B, and, well, I never have been able because of faulty "tight" action and no room to adjust inwards.

I cut this about 3/8" shorter than the slide that had been on the horn. I will run with it out at the same basic length, but now I can push in, AND the action has the right touch to allow me to use one finger in the pull ring to move it in or out. This is a mod I have wanted to do since I got this tuba in 2006.

Here are some pics…

Old outer slide assembly on the horn…




This is the completed 2nd slide…




Here you can see the very easy, leak-free action. Every now and then, nothing but new slide tubing will fix a screwed-up slide.

[the elephant]

Okay, I decided to install the slide assembly. I sort of cleaned up the valve section with Simichrome polish. Now I have a good idea of what sort of joint cleanup is ahead of me. Seeing how it was very little, I ended up doing most of it tonight.

The next step is to look at how it and the inner branches will line up between the bugle's outer branches and the valve section.

Win!


There is still some cleanup, but I can do that later. I still need to leak test everything.


My lower 1st slide was a biotch to align, but I nailed it way back when. However, it was really messy. It cleaned up pretty well. I may leave the skinnier tube end ring on the short side, despite how that bugs the crap out of me. I *really* do not want to have to build that short leg again.