Hard cases with wheels.

[bloke]

Some other players and myself have recently decided to put our high-dollar padded bags away and start using hard cases to protect our instruments better. Ironically we're not young, but we're just tired of dents and other weird damage appearing out of nowhere.
Wheels on cases are handy to reduce the effective weight, but they're not going to last forever, and here are a few tips to get them to last longer:

- Use them as little as possible, by driving up to the stage door or entrance, wheeling the case inside the door to a relatively safe, secure, or guarded area (or adjacent to trusted colleagues), and then parking the car wherever the car has to be parked.

- Avoid bumping over curbs that are more than a half inch tall. Reach over and pick up the case by the main handle and avoid any sort of serious curb or bump. Be mindful of the fact that most wheels on most tuba cases are held in place by aluminum rivets which rivet plastic to plastic.

- Even though this is recommended regardless of whether there are wheels, don't load up the case with stuff other than the tuba which adds significant weight.

- Avoid running wheels across concrete or asphalt. That's just like using sandpaper on your plastic wheels. Look back to the first suggestion above about dropping it off and then going off to park.

- Just as you would never allow someone else to drive your manual transmission car (because most people don't know how, and would tear up your clutch), don't allow other people to wheel your case around, because they won't follow these suggestions and will tear your wheels up on your case.

[Jperry1466]

Most of those that I've encountered have wheels that are somewhat recessed into the case and are way too small. They are hard to keep in balance while rolling. The ones with larger wheels are really nice to roll, but they require more room in the car and in storage.

[bloke]

Most of those that I've encountered have wheels that are somewhat recessed into the case and are way too small. They are hard to keep in balance while rolling. The ones with larger wheels are really nice to roll, but they require more room in the car and in storage.

I was taught to PUSH the cases with small and not-widely-spaced wheels.

It works.

I nearly always handle mine that way.

When I don't, I have to be extra careful to avoid allowing the case to tip.

[2bahawk]

I had one case, Jupiter, where one of the wheels lost a chunk. The tuba sounded like a helicopter rolling down the hall. With the new tuba, a Yamaha, (yeah I know you don't like them) I have a new wheeled case. Your advice seems prudent.

[bloke]

Yamaha has always included cases with instruments. When Yamaha first appeared on the scene with their tubas, this was a game-changer, as - previously - ALL tubas' cases were sold separately - as accessories.
Probably the sturdiest "included" cases these days are Jupiter and JP (as JP cycles out their albeit "very good" zipper cases and moves over to heavy molded cases with latches). The JP molded cases are quite heavy (some mistake them for fiberglass), but do have wheels.

The best Yamaha tuba cases were the earliest ones, which were made of shaped (curved) wood, with a top-quality black/Tolex covering (blue fuzzy interior).

A "local" (1-1/2 hours away) school customer has an older YBB-321 with a dumpster-ready old case (one of those crummy brown ones).
I located them a really good condition early 1980's BLACK WOOD one, and hooked them up with the owner of that case. The school is paying $250 for that case and $150 to have it shipped (' seems like a good deal to me). There were no wheels on those, but I'd rather have a sturdy case with no wheels than a garbage case with wheels. ...That having been said, the bottom corners are curved so - if the school chooses to risk trashing the good/vintage black case - they could cut out rectangles and install plastic wheels, I suppose.

re: ANY tuba case - when encountering young scholars:
"I wouldn't loan them any of my own stuff; they could even f--- up a ball bearing."


EDIT:
I became curious (while typing) and quickly scanned the OTB catalog...
Here's (at least one...) a wheel that appears to be able to fastened to a curved bottom corner WITHOUT chopping a hole in the case...but (to me) it looks as if it's begging to be busted off...

OTB wheel.png (49.04 KiB) Viewed 888 times

If a wood or masonite case, NO wheel should EVER be wood-screwed on.
Wheels need to ALWAYS be BOLTED on (washers/nuts/machine threads).

[rodgeman]

Why not keep the padded bag and use one of these https://a.co/d/6cImQEn ?

I used one to move my bell front Mirafone 186 and my Cerveny 601. Once I get into another group I may use it on my Eastman with a gig bag. I like the fact I can pad the bottom and have the bell up. The body is protected by a metal basket and the wheels work very well. Easily replaced. Also fold able to store.

Or save up for a Gard Wheelie - https://www.gardbags.com/en/brasswind/tuba/wheelie.

[LeMark]

I like the concept of a gard, but for the life of me I've never owned a tuba that was the size that they come in

[Jperry1466]

I was taught to PUSH the cases with small and not-widely-spaced wheels.

I always push the cases, whether the wheels are large or small. Perhaps I should just slow down. Oh well, not a problem any more. My 184 only has a gig bag, and a wheeled dolly does the carrying.

[bloke]

The reason that I don't use padded bags and bring grocery carts along is because a grocery cart and a padded bag is probably more trouble than a hard case, as well as not being as protective as a hard case.

I also think about violinists and cellists, how valuable their instruments are, and - though they are fragile, they are really not as fragile as our own instruments (size:structure physics). A bow could be put in an aluminum tube and still fit in a padded bag, yet just about all of them carry their instruments in hard cases.
The fact that our instruments in hard cases weigh more than theirs doesn't mean that hard cases aren't far more protective than bags with minimal padding in them.
Dents and worse damage annoy me a lot more than the extremely limited amounts of time that I end up carrying my instruments in hard cases. Stage doors are usually less than 200 feet from stages, and involve smooth floors (and either an elevator or maybe five or six stairs). When rehearsing in non-performance venues, sometimes there's actually an outside door that goes right to the rehearsal room. Pulling my car up to the curb, taking the tuba in, and then going to park just isn't a nuisance - at least not to me, and it involves less actual carrying than trying to put a bag on my back, (hoping that it's clean enough to not put stuff on the back of my black suit), and carrying it from 1,000 ft away or more.

I've gone back and forth over the years between bags and cases. Sometimes I didn't have cases for every instrument. I now do, even though (me being someone who tries to not spend the most I can possibly spend on things) it was some trouble to find cases for every instrument that didn't cost $700 plus $300 shipping. Stating the obvious is that I'm older than I've ever been, but the bag thing just really isn't any sort of protection for something that's only scantily thicker than a half millimeter thick yet is over three feet long by a foot and a half wide. I've not only had to repair my own stuff over the years due to bags, but countless hundreds of other people's tubas. A lot of the cello cases and violin cases cost well over $1,000. I think I think it's a matter of proportion. Hardly any of them play Chinese instruments that cost $300 to $1,000, and most of them seem to play instruments that cost $20,000 and up, so cases (a significant percentage of which - I've noticed - are carbon fiber) cost $1000 to $2,000 don't seem like a major expense to them. A final point is that the best tuba bags - which still offer no real protection - are creeping up in price closer and closer to the prices of hard cases. I'm holding on to my top of the line tuba bags, so that - when I croak - my tubas will be easier to sell to people who feel like they must have bags to carry their tubas around.

[DonO.]

I have a friend in community band who transports his tuba in a Cronkhite bag with a modified golf bag push cart. He modified it himself and has told me he would be willing to modify one for me too. I said no thank you since I’m on Team Hard Case.

My King is in its factory case, which is basically a wheeled MTS with King logo slapped on. I have run the wheels on asphalt and concrete for 3 years with no problems. If I couldn’t do that it would be pretty useless to me. I do lift it for cracks, uneven places, holes, thresholds, etc. Sometimes when we have outdoor gigs I have to travel over grassy terrain and the wheels don’t work well for that at all. At those times I wish I had a gig bag with backpack straps. I had an Altieri like that a long time ago. It worked well.

My small horn, the Kanstul 3/4, is in one of those traditional generic wood cases. No wheels and quite heavy. What I have done for that is get a small moving dolly from Harbor Freight ($12) and I attach it to the case with a ratchet strap. It’s kind of rustic looking but it works well! I’ll probably do the same with the King if the wheels ever eventually wear out or break.

[bloke]

If plastic wheels on plastic molded cases are used a whole bunch on rough surfaces - such as parking lots and things like that - they will eventually break, but - if they are replaced right away with the same type wheel - that is something that's possible, as long as it's done before the case is dragged around on a broken wheel and the case itself (the opening designed for wheel installation) is not damaged.

People are going to do what they want to do, obviously, and there's always a tendency to be harder on equipment than the type of service for which equipment was designed to be used.
I don't see myself pulling my padded bags back down out of storage and sticking them in one of those grocery cart things, because that puts steel rods within a half an inch of my thin brass tuba with only a layer of thick cloth and a half an inch of padding between the steel rods and the sheet brass.

[tclements]

I'd recommend a foldable luggage cart. Go to uline.com and search for "folding hand truck." I put my tubas in their (Cronkhite) gig bag, BELL UP, and bungee the tuba to the hand truck. The bungee that comes with the cart is crap, get a better one (or two!). The best application is to PULL the cart if you are going over rough terrain. You can push it once it is indoors with a relatively smooth floor. This particular dolly has large wheels so it rolls much better than most.

GOOD LUCK!

Re: Gard bags - They sent me a couple, and while they are well constructed cases, I got all "OOKEY" when I had to put a tuba BELL DOWN in a rolling case. For euph, it was better. With the haveier large tubas, I didn't get the groove.