I don't know anything about this tuba. It's fairly short, heavy, and the first rotor (or all of them??...I haven't measured the rest) is a 19mm bore rotor.
It's got the typical B&S mouthpipe config, whereby the mouthpipe zig-zags into the lower side port of the 5th rotor.
It also has the old-school roughly-two-whole-tones 5th slide (most of which is attached to the slide itself and is fished down behind the exit tubing from the subsequent rotors).
Not knowing anything (and based on the fact that the middle/upper G's and the top C are wildly sharp - compared to the general tuning, my guesses (???) are that the bugle might be an old B-flat design, the horizontal slide on the B-flat version was short-circuited via a vertical slide, and a short bell was fitted to the bottom bow...eh...??
VOILA !!! C tuba (with issues).
The entire instrument is also quite high pitched, and requires an epic pull for A=440.
I doubt that I'll be able to do anything about the G's and the C (luckily, neither the F-sharps nor the B-natural are particularly bad...I'm pretty sure the G's will have to be played with 4, and the top C will be played with 1 with a pull), but (also taking into account that the man's a tall Texan) I'm "seeing about" lengthening it from the mouthpipe end (as lengthening the main slide would define the slide hitting the chair seat, and raising up the valveset would require moving a dozen braces plus re-bending the o.e.m. mouthpipe around a fatter portion of the bell (anyway).
I put in an hour before supper on this...(Yes, I've been procrastinating...you know: dreaded stuff, etc.)
I'm sorta proud that it
- misses all of the obstacles
- doesn't look terribly goofy when dry-mounted
- after a considerable about of work with a very small dent hammer and rounding rings, most of the severely curved areas are just about round
I'm going to play fatbastard (Miraphone 98) to calm down, and work on next month's concert's fifteen 4th trombone parts (hybrid jazz band/symphony orchestra Valentine pops concert), think about this mouthpipe in the back of my mind, hit the sack, and then see about getting this mouthpipe looking better (and perhaps even mounting it) tomorrow.
Other than that, the guy would like dents removed, the o.e.m. linkage tightened up, and (probably) some interior cleaning. Per typical with communist East German B&S lacquer, most of it is gone, so I hate to do a chem-clean (removing four decades of patina), and might just have to do some inefficient/slow manual rotor casings cleaning job.
The gent told me he would pay whatever it took and whatever I think it needs, but I'm not one to take advantage to that type of situation (and I believe most everyone knows that).
Anyway...Please send good karma re: this mouthpipe. Tomorrow, I'm going to do some annealing, and will temporarily brace and burnish the insides of the steep curves. I believe I shall have added c. 3+" to the instrument via this 'pipe.
