At least one person on this board sells these things, I believe.
I just picked up another school (which is really cool, because it's halfway between some other newish clients).
They showed me a couple of these things. Actually, they're pretty good, and (surely) way less expensive than King.
The pistons are typical Jinbao pistons, but they do go up and down, and – certainly compared to fifty years ago – King pistons are nothing to brag about, either.
Some of the bracing looks to be tenuous, but none of the braces were broken (though the top bell brace was jacked sideways).
The thing, though, is the goosenecks.
They are all trashed and covered with band-director tape.
I got the "We only have $XXX to spend, but can you fix these three bass clarinets and two of these three contras?" thing...
...so we agreed, of course.
but with the caveat being, "Oh yeah, and could you fix these three trashed goosenecks, and ALSO bring them back back stronger than they were when new?
...so (not wishing to give away too-too many free hours) I decided on a nickel tubing sleeve that ends where the bow begins and covers about 3/8" - 1/2" (??) of the receiver. Of course (besides un-fubaring it), I had to remove/reinstall the receiver, the brace, and the lyre box.
Anyway, time will tell if this is any more dolt-proof that it was before.
These schools are weird:
After we pick up a new one, we fix up all of their beat-up crap really well, each year they need less-and-less work, which frees us up to pick up more schools, in the meantime some of those schools end up with new band directors (who - ignorant - contract hacks to fix their stuff), their stuff gets all torn up (and crappily patched back together by hacks) again, they find out about us from others, and we end up getting those schools back.
bloke "weird cycles...probably why there's such a thing as 'death'...repeating cycles - after a while - become really boring"
something else stupid - related to getting old:
I found this tubing on a rack in the corner of the shop: 16mm o.d. and 17mm o.d. (telescoping, aka inside/outside) I have NO IDEA when the hell I bought it, and I JUST RECENTLY bought some of BOTH sizes for a project...when I had this $h!t sitting on that rack all along.
Jinbao contras
- bloke
- Mid South Music
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Jinbao contras
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- the elephant (Wed May 18, 2022 8:51 pm) • York-aholic (Thu May 19, 2022 12:42 am)
- bloke
- Mid South Music
- Posts: 19505
- Joined: Thu Aug 13, 2020 8:55 am
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Re: Jinbao contras
Well, I finished this mess of contras, today. Of course, all the bells looked like wadded up tinfoil, and their flares were so close to the top bow, that I had to fix part of the flares by holding on to a dent hammer handle pushing the head of the hammer against the brass in the bell to push the dents out… Damn. … but there was no way that I was going to take those bells off those instruments. They look fine, so now: back to those horrible Yamaha 321’s.
Oh yeah, I also worked on a (real) musical instrument today that belongs to one of my friends: It is a handmade boutique-y maker double horn that had a couple of loose braces and the tuning slide coming right out of the mouthpipe wasn’t aligned particularly well, so now it pulls out with ease. Calipers sure are handy, aren’t they?
What else, today…?? a haircut for tomorrow’s Brahms Requiem, and I rounded up some more stuff to improve the quality of life of one of Mrs. bloke’s dogs - an escape artist (more free stuff: a friend gave me a huge length of 3/16” braided steel cable - left over from a job he was contracted to do which remote-control tilts thousands of solar panels throughout each day). I’m rigging up a contraption so that this dog can run all the way around in his pasture, but whereby he absolutely can’t get out. (Thus dog freaks out whenever there’s strong wind or thunder. He is a Pyrenees, and they are prone to be that way. (He digs out under the fence, even though there’s barbed wire. He probably doesn’t even feel it with his thick white fur.) His female Pyrenees companion is much more brave. He’s just a big sissy…
… so tomorrow I get to play “guy who gets to stay clean all day because he’s a musician“ instead of “filthy dirty guy who holds marching contras up in the air next to dent rollers, dent machines, and buffing machines, BUT…
I need to run the weed trailer around the outside of the garden area (an area of about an acre outside of the vegetable garden should be enough area) before we plant the vegetable garden in the morning, so even though I’ll bathe, I’ll probably show up for that gig smelling like broadleaf herbicide. (I can poison the rest of the property later, but I don’t need to be spraying that stuff anywhere near the vegetable garden, once it is planted.)
I would tell you even more about my fascinating life, but I’ve already missed half of the first nightly episode of Hogan’s Heroes (tonight is the episode where Kinchlow boxes against Bruno, the Nazi soldier), so…
Oh yeah, I also worked on a (real) musical instrument today that belongs to one of my friends: It is a handmade boutique-y maker double horn that had a couple of loose braces and the tuning slide coming right out of the mouthpipe wasn’t aligned particularly well, so now it pulls out with ease. Calipers sure are handy, aren’t they?
What else, today…?? a haircut for tomorrow’s Brahms Requiem, and I rounded up some more stuff to improve the quality of life of one of Mrs. bloke’s dogs - an escape artist (more free stuff: a friend gave me a huge length of 3/16” braided steel cable - left over from a job he was contracted to do which remote-control tilts thousands of solar panels throughout each day). I’m rigging up a contraption so that this dog can run all the way around in his pasture, but whereby he absolutely can’t get out. (Thus dog freaks out whenever there’s strong wind or thunder. He is a Pyrenees, and they are prone to be that way. (He digs out under the fence, even though there’s barbed wire. He probably doesn’t even feel it with his thick white fur.) His female Pyrenees companion is much more brave. He’s just a big sissy…
… so tomorrow I get to play “guy who gets to stay clean all day because he’s a musician“ instead of “filthy dirty guy who holds marching contras up in the air next to dent rollers, dent machines, and buffing machines, BUT…
I need to run the weed trailer around the outside of the garden area (an area of about an acre outside of the vegetable garden should be enough area) before we plant the vegetable garden in the morning, so even though I’ll bathe, I’ll probably show up for that gig smelling like broadleaf herbicide. (I can poison the rest of the property later, but I don’t need to be spraying that stuff anywhere near the vegetable garden, once it is planted.)
I would tell you even more about my fascinating life, but I’ve already missed half of the first nightly episode of Hogan’s Heroes (tonight is the episode where Kinchlow boxes against Bruno, the Nazi soldier), so…