LOL...those tiny little super-thick-brass Besson tubas from the 1980's

[bloke]

Today, I'm trying to take one (SILVER, of course - because the sound, you know... ) to the finish line.

- The bottom bow was smushed in 50%.
- All the slides were frozen (requiring un-soldering/pulling all their bows, using smelly PB Blaster, and extracting their individual tubes with a dent ball and vice grips).
- The top bow and inner bows were also all dented up.
- The (ie. "convertible") mouthpipe tension screw's head - inaccessible with all but the longest-skinniest needle-nose pliers - was broken off (extra fun!).
- (Thankfully) only one brace (third-to-first slide small brace) was busted (from someone in the past attempting to "yank" slides), but several slides' soldered flanges are only half-attached.
- REALLY thick metal defined two-inches of earth magnets on the inner bows - and mashing with all my might...which may not be as much might as thirty years ago (??).
- TOP valve caps were all frozen...!?!? (Had anyone EVER oiled the valves...??)
- There was more damage, but "run-of-the-mill".

Yes, I believe in "something larger than myself", but I don't believe there are various "brands/factions" of "that which is larger than myself"...and what if one that some other one claims "are all going to Hell" actually ARE all "going to Hell", and I were to pick THAT one!?!?
Therefore, I tend to only attend "church" when hired to do so...
Preachers believe they save souls on Sundays.
On Sundays, I save crappy tubas.

oh yeah: The Jakob Winter case: just fine

[bloke]

breaktime from Hell...

It's soaking (I didn't charge for a cleaning job, but NOT doing one would make it too difficult to get everything to work - once assembled.

[bloke]

Now putting it back together, I discovered that someone in the past decided to remove inside slide tube dents with an expander, so even though I managed to extract all the slides by getting one tube out at a time, I'm finding that just doing a chemical clean isn't enough to make the slides work. This is one of those "even three times what I quoted wasn't enough" gigs.

[2nd tenor]

Is it their 787 model?

It’d be interesting - to me at least - to see pictures of it when you’re finished and to ‘hear’ what you have to say about it as a player.

[bloke]

I've played plenty of them. The body and bell are tiny and the bore is the same as Besson copiers use on the English E-flat tubas, which is .689". It's really easy for that big bore to overpower that tiny little tuba and to make blasting sounds, but they sold a bunch of them. I think they were marketed in the United States and engraved as Boosey and Hawkes Regent, but I've sold I've seen some older ones with Besson valve caps and Besson engraving - along with a small English shank.

Most imported to the USA - I think - we're sold out of a place in New Jersey, and featured a concert and a marching mouthpipe pair, neither of which were designed particularly well. (Almost all which still exist today have had their (concert, of course) mouthpipe connectors soldered - due to otherwise leaking horribly.)

The super small body and the relatively quite large bore - with these 3/4 size tubas - makes them different from all the rest.
I think it might be interesting for a cradle in your arms gig horn to take something like a Brazil knockoff of a Yamaha 104 (missing a irreplaceable valve or something), and sticking a King 3-valve front-action valve section on it from some King that's missing its bell - or had its bell sold off because it was upright, etc.

I don't like working on these little Besson tubas, haven't had to work on any of them in several years, particularly don't like working on this one because I undercharged badly, and one of the main reasons I hate working on these things is because the bottom bows on all of them are always smashed in severely, and they have this big sheet metal cap that does nothing towards protecting them - but makes it very difficult to straighten them back out.

[Dents Be Gone!]

I agree, guys. This is the way to go.

[bloke]

I'm just going to admit (feeling extremely foolish, right now) that this is a $600 repair for which I quoted under $200 - due to all of the hidden damage.

The slides were stick (scale), but they were ALSO all cockamamie - OTHER THAN the main slide, which (alignment/condition-wise) rates a B (not B+).

They were terrible...all out of kilter, and all of the outside tubes featured huge dents under the braces...I used a slide expander (with vice grips as a handle) as a friggin' DENT TOOL, rather than any sort of expander. I - just got now - all INDIVIDUAL pairs of inside/outside tubes working (well enough for a kid to pull/push), I've got #2 working WELL (A+)...which was 3/16" out of parallel...I've got #1 working B- (which is the best it's going to be, because I'm not putting in another $100 worth of free time) and I took part of the crazy #3 circuit apart, and am going to put it back together BACKWARDS (fitting the circuit to the slide - rather than the slide to the circuit), due to the nutty config...ie. I've got the circuit set up to "swivel" to fit the properly-aligned slide.

Thankfully, ALL the pistons continue to work (due too the "armor-thick" casings.

RIght now, I'm taking a 15-minute break (to halfway get over being pissed off at myself).

The band director (with whom I'm on very good terms) and I will talk...The next batch (of five or so) are each going to need about a $100 bump-up on their quoted repair prices (to catch up for all the work I did, here).

I'm thinking that there isn't anyone else around here who could/would have done what I did - to get this thing going, and - were it that they could have done all of this - they would have charged a whole bunch more than - even - 600 bucks to do it...no brag...just fact.

[bloke]

OK...Other than clean-up, this little b@$t@rd is done.

I looked at the OTHER one (same model, and last o' the batch) -
- lacquer (so I can anneal stuff, if I need to)
- all valves and slides work
- no broken braces
- quoted SEVERAL hundred dollars. ' must have regained my sanity, by the time I got to the last one...(??)

[bloke]

I hate these little b@$t@rds with a passion.
I would never buy one, unless only a few easy-to-reach dents, shiny, with it's Jakob Winter case, and - even then - only for a very modest price... and NEVER to flip to a LOCAL school...ONLY to a school way off away somewhere...and their sound is a "grunt" type of resonance - re: reminiscent of a "mini-piggy" (with apologies to the piggy fans).





The other one is LACQUER, all beat-up, but ALL the slides and valves work on the OTHER one, the detachable mouthpipe on the other one is NOT twisted and does NOT hopelessly leak at the connection...so just some un-soldering, dent removal, and sticking back together.

[bloke]

last one (same model Besson but not silver...)

Both of the Besson tubas were customized to be "extra slim" (for extra-small band rooms, or to more easily fit on school buses).

Since this one isn't silver, I can throw that bottom bow cap in the trash (later replacing it with a simple sousaphone guard wire), anneal the bottom bow (to soften the brass), and avoid taking Mrs. bloke away from woodwind repairs to swing the 3-pound sledge...

[bloke]

This has to be as far as I'm going with this (FUBAR lacquered Besson) before Sunday.

I'm going out-of-town to play a concert, and Mrs. bloke is trying to knock out the last two (of a set of four) alto saxophones to sell to a school.
We had hoarded a big stack of Japanese Yamaha 23's, and we've actually been selling bunches of them (fixed up nicely and re-padded) to schools.
THIS particular school:
(' full retail brick-and-mortar goes-out-to-schools store charges way too much to rent, and top-down orchestrated 2+ year shutdown behavior/compliance experiment has impoverished everyone...plus the inflation caused by the same people...so NO ONE at that school opted to rent an alto saxophone).

Anyway...
I need to get the lacquer touched up on the last two saxophones for that school (prior to her re-pad work) and also check for peck-dents...
Otherwise, Mrs. bloke will be at a standstill over the weekend.

This (bottom bow portion of the tuba repair) is about 90% as good as I can do...
It's a REPAIR, and not a "restoration".

Again, I tossed the useless sheet metal cap in the trash, and cut a piece off an old used not-to-badly-bunged-up sousaphone guard wire.
REMINDER: With the SILVER one (same model) I had to leave that stupid cap in place, and do the best I could do with it there...(not as good as this lacquered one).
This one WAS beat-up worse than the silver one, so it was a constant fight to keep the "legs" of the bow the proper distance apart. (Actually, it was SO messed up that the legs were actually SKEW. )

[arpthark]

Is that re-lacquered or raw brass?

[bloke]

I'm not going to shoot any clear on it until it's stuck back on the tuba...
the two ends...they still have some original old funky lacquer on them...and may well STILL have it, after it's put back together (if I avoid burning any of it).

I annealed 2/3rds of this thing - so as to (again) avoid asking Mrs. bloke to beat on the dent-ball-supporting rod with a 3-lb. hand sledge as hard as she can (yes: really)...because she has some saxophones that need to be completed. The annealing burns nearly 100% of the lacquer and deeply turns the brass black...which - subsequently - required buffing the hell out of it (very little actual material removed, but a bunch of upper body effort) to get back down to un-burned brass.

The actual reason that I post some of these "reality" (REAL reality, and not "reality-show" type of reality) repair threads (vs. "Here's some super-cool stuff I'm going to this super-cool instrument"), is to demonstrate that this is another one of Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs". This crap is NOT glamorous, and it's NOT "sitting on a stool in a white lab coat"...

...but - just as with ALL of Mike Rowe's OTHER "Dirty Jobs" - this $h!t needs to be done just about right - because it's REAL (ie. 3D and actual solid groups of molecules, etc...), not opinion-biased blather recited to students, not tippy-typing on a computer...and not offering advice. If it's not nearly absolutely right, it's just $h!t (as with the overwhelming majority of elected officials, bureaucrats, and their spewed narratives, etc...)

ie. NOT elegant, NOT exotic, and (rather than someone's "opinion" or "based on someone's experience") it's either right or wrong...and either done well or done poorly...and - if the only boss is oneself - there's no one else to blame, and no one else at whom one can be pissed off.