This Guy Must be HIGH!

[the elephant]

A hundred bucks for a handful of used, dirty braces?

AND $10.00 for shipping?

I certainly hope the paper plate is included…

[url+https://www.ebay.com/itm/394579511627?h ... R-yxm5X3YQ]HILARIOUS![/url]

[arpthark]

Mmm. Looks like robot lunch.

[LeMark]

When I first saw the picture I thought it was ice cream with chocolate shavings

[The Big Ben]

Should be more like $10 and $5 for shipping.

There are a buttload of trumpet valve stems there in the mess which are worthless in the world of tuba.

[bloke]

All I see is tarnish.

Some of them really come in handy for sticking kids' trumpets back together, and others are a good match for King, when someone's soldering tuba bows in a compact (front-to-back) wrap while assembling a frankentuba.

Each of them would cost at least $8 or $10 to buy new, and none of them look particularly mangled, and - if there is solder on some of them - I'd have to look closer to find it.

Priority Mail is about ten bucks for a Priority padded bag with the included $100 insurance.
He's doing 1st Class Postage, but that's still going to cost $5 or $6, and eBay is going to take a chunk from him.

I've got a good bit of that stuff, but I'm continuously using it up...

...not arguin', not defendin', just sayin'...

If I showed this to Mrs. bloke - and told her I was buying it (even though we're not rollin' in dough, right now) she would shrug her shoulders.

[bort2.0]

In all the good and bad ways...

...sometimes, you just don't know what you've got!

[LeMark]

seems like there are as many trumpet valve stems in there as there are braces.

I have a bag of braces here that has come in very handy over the years and projects. I do wish I had more of the braces with the bar in the middle that you can adjust for length. Those are life savers

[bloke]

seems like there are as many trumpet valve stems in there as there are braces.

I have a bag of braces here that has come in very handy over the years and projects. I do wish I had more of the braces with the bar in the middle that you can adjust for length. Those are life savers

I have discovered that the nickel thought-to-be-adjustable braces on some of the newer Miraphone models were only adjustable once. They braze the rods into the sockets rather than soldering them. When I was dialing in the fourth circuit alignment on my fat bastard, I discovered this, one of those assembies is slightly shorter than perhaps it should have been, so I had to float solder.
This suggests that some of the complicated twists and turns in some of the newer models are probably all very close to the same, but not exactly the same. They likely measure the spaces, braze these three piece assemblies together off the instrument to width, and then (lead) solder them in place.
This offers them a little bit of leeway without sacrificing brace strength, as soldered socket braces obviously can't ever be quite as strong as brazed braces.

[YorkNumber3.0]

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[bloke]

Looks like a bunch of other part lots, too. All seem to have a “make offer” button. They also have a funky, somewhat rusty, Ferree’s Z60 dent machine on what appears to be a rolling base (not sure how that would work! ) with a weird hodge-podge of parts, some Z60, some “other” at $3500. Potential good deal if they’re seriously reasonable about the “make offer.”

As long as the Z60 user is wearing roller skates, wouldn't that equal things out?

Something else to consider...
New instrument prices (being non-essential merchandise) have not been able to keep up with the hyperinflation...
...but PARTS prices (to repair existing instruments) have.

again...Food and fuel is all double and more...

Finally, I'm not disagreeing with Wade, but things really have changed, and a lot of that stuff comes in really handy, particularly if there's some repair guy that doesn't have any of that kind of stuff.

[the elephant]

We just go about business differently. I would give the guy $30 for that junk. I'd give him $35 if he would remove all the trumpet valve stems for me and wash them in hot, soapy water. I would not even consider giving him $110 for it because I would likely never use half of it. I already have many hundreds of dirty, used braces in boxes.

[bloke]

I tried offering $45 ($55), but there's some quirk in eBay that requires me to select some method of payment, if they accept the offer, and that weird new feature kept going around in circles...so screw it. I told the person that I'd buy them, if they could manage to figure out who I am and how to reach me.

meh...I'll live with out them. Surely (with my eBay username) they can find me, if they really need to get rid of that jar of crap.

3/4ths of the time involved in replacing a brace (such as those) is looking through crap that already have - and FINDING something...as I'd really rather not silver braze busted braces back together when I'm hurrying through school repairs.

Mrs. bloke wanted to check off one-of-four (split up into amounts and dates, per reg's) repair orders for a school...On that first repair order, she had a tenor and a bari, and I had an old brown lizard Bundy trombone and one of those mediocre-intermediate Bach trig-bones, on that order. (We're headed that way tomorrow, and could drop them off, along with the invoice.) I only quoted $45 for the Bundy, but then discovered crap that I didn't originally notice (having really not examined it very closely at all). I ended up taking the playing slide apart, "DE-flattening the playing slide bow, straightening all four tubes on the lathe, sticking it back together, removing a bunch of bell dents, and removing a bunch of tuning slide bow (and tuning slide tube) dents (One thing I NEVER do is call up some band director and tell them I didn't charge enough, because that's mickey-mouse b.s.)...but it still only took under an hour (so not so terribly far "in the hole") BECAUSE NO PARTS NEEDED REPLACING, AND I DIDN'T HAVE TO LOOK ALL OVER THE PLACE, WASTING TIME TRYING TO FIND COMPATIBLE PARTS.

[YorkNumber3.0]

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