I knew that tackling/achieving perfect alignment would be a booger, but tonight I thought, "What the hell"?
(Ketosis sort of gives the person in it a slight sensation of a "high"...the [false] feeling that they can achieve great things, and should take them on.
OK...I fooled myself into taking this gig on, tonight.)
It's now properly aligned, and I even cut and refashioned the large-side brace from it to the bottom bow (to the new defined geometry).
There surely was a sh!tload of stuff to move (think of the Apollo 13 movie - where they manually pointed that contraption they were in towards the Earth) in order to achieve this. Oh well, it only took a couple of hours, and - after all - it's mine and - further - it is THE BEST F tuba on the planet (no sarcasm/no exaggeration), so - yes? - it deserved a properly-aligned main slide.
I actually had to saw off about (??) 3/32" of tubing from the end of the large/dogleg side, because - when B&S handmade these instruments, the inside slide tubes were fit to the quick, and changing the geometry (for alignment) ended up "pulling" the dogleg further towards the bottom of the tuba. (Thus, the large side hit well before the small side.)
...way-WAY too many nit-picky details to discuss, and these pics don't mean anything.
Oh yeah...for those of you familiar with these instruments, and are noticing that the main slide is out a bit far, here's why:
(We're utility bill cheapskates.)
All of these (per usual with bloke) are nothing but "boring "after" pics:
This arrow shows that this outside slide tube was previously too close to the other one (at this end) by c. 8 or 9 thousandths of an inch.
I moved it the OPPOSITE direction indicated by the red arrow.
These were/are REMARKABLE handmade instruments, and - unlike the cheapo ones they've made since - the dogleg and the top bow (all the way around to the bottow bow) was ONE LONG PIECE...nearly four feet long.
