I spread out this (dozens-upon-dozens of individual repair jobs WITHIN this ONE repaired instrument) over three days...only a few hours each day, and then back to other smaller jobs and "busy" work, etc...
This - overall - required a ridiculous number of hours, though.
I'm sure it well exceeded an entire "workday"...possibly nine or ten hours total...
...and (during the time that I was actually working on this ridiculous mess) I was chuggin' along pretty good.
(I'm NOT slow, and am results-driven - rather than procedures-driven.)
Anyway...
It's ready to go back:
The pistons - just friggin' DID NOT work...but I managed to get all four of them working (very nicely, thank-you very much) WITHOUT shoving any "tools"
in their casings. I'm NOT going to list all the stuff I did... ie. "boring rhetoric that no one will read - and rightly they should NOT read - and nor should I type - it".
(...and Mrs. bloke helped hold it at goofy angles for me - when re-installing the top bow.)
I did NOT "blueprint" the slides (OTHER THAN the main slide). All the rest (once everything was put back where it all originally was) work as well as any "not-thrown-across-the-room-fifteen-times" Olds/Reynolds slides (ie. alignment +/- .010"
I'm actually wondering if it was a good decision to "blueprint" the main slide, because (now that its not under any misalignment tension) I'm a bit worried that it could slide out onto the floor.
' remember that 90-degree crease dent in the small size of the bottom bow?
That area was a booger...at least four annealings, and lots of pressure on my (from the Miraphone tuba's repairs: stress on my acute bursitis) left shoulder joint. (' no friggin' way was I going to pull off that big-@$$ bottom bow.)
reminder:
...and we ALL know that ALL of this crap was months of accumulated damage and the kid ("look what happened while this instrument was on a shelf in its case over the closed-for-snow days !!!") ONLY showed this crap to the band director AFTER it ABSOLUTELY WOULD NOT PLAY.
bloke "I'm seeing - from the pics - that I need to wipe off a few smudges...Otherwise, the finish is 'as good as I'm willing to do'- based on what they handed me...and YES: I DID notice that the brand-new Elkhorn-bought finger button had NO glue and its pearl fell off. It's now glued in."