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I have had a mostly complete York sousaphone valve section since about 1996. I have saved it and dragged it from house to house until I bought the one I am in. It is in rough condition, but has some very nice features that made me want to have the three-piston valve set rebuilt. And of course, I have never managed to get around to that task.

The knuckles all were pretty trashed — bent up, crushed, torn, etc. The valves worked, but poorly.

Pros

• roundest through-ports I have ever seen in tuba pistons
• cool "water keys" in bottom caps (prevents oil/water drips)
• Mr. Jacobs tried them in one of the Yorks (they fit and the ports match up)

Issues?

• only three valves
• wide OD to piston bodies (slower action)
• very long stroke (to get the very open porting)
• very worn piston/casing faces
• very worn details and knurling on casings and caps

Here is a terrible, low res photo of these valves with all the savable tubing from the sousaphone carcass. The serial number indicates the probable year of manufacture was very late 1934 or early 1935.

As you can see, I salvaged 1st, 2nd, all of upper 3rd, main, and most of the lower leadpipe with the heavyweight "knife blade" brace. Not too shabby for a free dumpster pick! Again, this was probably in 1996.

So about ten years ago I started hunting for another set with the water keys in the caps, of the same model and vintage my wife and I both lost our teaching gigs. (Remember the "Great Recession"?) It turned out that shortly after I posted about this on TubeNet and started surfing eBay that we suffered this loss of income, and we pretty quickly picked up some temp work, but when that ran out we missed some house payments. At that time, our own "bloke" located an identical set for me on eBay and I lamented that I was unable to pay the nominal price for them, because they are actually pretty rare to find these days with all parts.

Joe saved my bacon by buying them, shipping them to me once we had talked about repayment, and eventually (and way too slowly) paid him back. (Thanks, Joe!) The serial number on this set indicates it was made in 1932.

Here are the pics from the eBay auction. They were sort of fuzzy and the green corrosion on the outer tubes that makes no sense being there turned out to be some sort of lichen or mossy stuff. I think these lived in a damp barn for many years. Who knows? They cleaned up enough for me in the end.

This older set came with all of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, but no parts for the main slide or the leadpipe.

One of the pistons was bent and did not want to move without a great deal of effort. The other two worked okay, but not as well as the shop-kept set I already had. (They had been "shop-kept" until I was directed to toss them out, so that I could then liberate them from the trash, as my boss had intended all along. Thanks, Charlie!) One of the cap water keys was missing a spring, and one was missing the plunger, retainer cap and spring. All the slide worked fairly well. It was all still soldered together.

After some checking I determined that the valves were interchangeable and the porting matched as well as could be expected for anything handmade back in those days. The ports in the casings of one set are all exactly two mm higher up the casing walls of the other set. (When I mated the 4th piston with the set of three it is two millimeters lower.) The caps all *should* interchange, but the thread sleeves on the casings all need to be replaced, and all the caps need their threads chased. Some fit extremely well, and one or two fit like Wisemann caps. (Need I say more?) Generally, most caps fit the best threads well, with one or two being very loose. Most caps were loose on the same casings, too. So some casings are worn down, and some caps are, too. This is all to be expected, and Dan Oberloh will fix all that, when the time comes.

The ports on this valve set all were excellent as it was still assembled, so none of the ends were cracked, torn or mangled, and all were still full length.

So after years of putzing around with these two valve sets I decided that none of my concerns mattered if a full rebuild was done, so which set of three worked best or which of the three from the sacrificial set would get used… none of that mattered. What Dave Secrist told me (when I had planned to have him do this work) was that all he needed was for the cobbled-together casing set needed to be assembled very well, preferably with silver solder. He had worked with soft soldered sets and was able to control the temps to keep them from falling apart, but he greatly disliked doing things that way. And I needed to have all the parts for the set, to include finger buttons, as he would use them at certain stages, as grab handles. They did not have to be the buttons and stems I was going to keep, but buttons and stems had to be available for him to use. If I included the "real" buttons and stems he could do some work to them, too, just like to the caps. It all depended on how much I wanted to spend. He could even replate the casings in super-thick (old school) silver for me if I wanted that.

And, of course, then he retired; I wanted too long to get to this project. So someday I will contact Dan Oberloh and set up a rebuild through him. I would prefer that, anyway, as Dan will make them look like factory new with better threads, buttons I want, correct stems, cap detailing, etc.

In the end, I decided to use my old set because for decades I had lugged these parts around with me from house to house, hoping to rescue them and add a valve. I had no attachment to the eBay set, and they had a lot of issues my original set did not have.

I putzed around with the two sets, lining up all the ports of the three valves to see how each would fit as a 4th valve. Klaus kept telling me to use the 2nd valve, but it was the really bad one. It also put both slide ports on one side, which is hard to design around for such a long slide circuit. I really wanted 1st. It was the best one, physically. It has the ports where they needed to be, and many sets I have examined have used a flipped 1st for 3rd and another 1st for 4th. Also, these are end valves, so there are only the two connecting pins. Second had pins on both sides, so there would be stumps to grind down and file/sand smooth on the outside face.

Then I realized that the offset of the through ports was really wide on these valves, so a 1st or 3rd would have the casing sticking up above the other three by about a quarter inch.

So that settled it. I used 2nd. I lopped off the two outer valves, cleaned up stuff as best I could, and then set to trying to fit them together very securely. My goal was to rescue every millimeter of knuckle and connecting pin length as I could, so both 1st and 3rd casings got destroyed in the process. What a shame! I was upset about this, but these valves were nearly useless and were not going to be used for much else (especially as they were two loose valves and not a set of two pinned together). So I gritted my teeth and fired up the Dremel tool…

Here it is from the other side. You can really see how the very-short-and-difficult-to-work-with knuckle ends are, nonetheless way too long.

You can see in that last pic that the attempt to rescue as much usable knuckle and pin material more or less worked, as I had too much of the knuckle. I trimmed things so the new 4th mated up at the correct distance and angle, which actually took some very slow, careful work with a file.

In the photo, the two very stubby knuckles are the halves to be mated together.

This was the answer. There is no gap, so this sleeve, if I could get it to fit really well, would be silver soldered around both ends to the casings and I would have what I needed.

The thing is that I have never really gotten this to fit well enough to make me happy.

Nowadays, I think I might simply butt braze the knuckle halves together directly. I have gotten my silver soldering back in good form, and that would be the best solution, if I can control stuff and not burn through the very thin knuckle tubing.

My alternate plan is to remove the two knuckle halves and make a new one from part of a upper 3rd crook that is the correct curve and size, and then hard solder that back into the two casings. The stumps could be cut off when the rebuild work is done.

Not sure… hmm…











This was stupidly soft soldered by an unthinking me. To clean that mess off well enough for silver solder to flow will take a lot of buffing, and the two knuckle stumps are thin. D'OH!


Currently, the sleeve is soft soldered to one side only, and the two pins are just brass rod that has been soft soldered to the surface of the casings. There is no seat drilled into the casings. This was an attempt to use my GI MK I Eyeball for pin alignment. I wanted solder pads to locate my drill press bit, but then wisely decided against that, so it is still assembled just like this. I decided to stop completely until I could do this work properly. Right now it is just a big, fat kludge.

It came out well; I got the measurements very close — close enough to use, when I can finally do the work. My one big peeve is that the ports for the new 4th are on the same side, and they are at a wonky angle. I can work with that, but it is annoying and will cause a lot of extra work for me.

I am seriously considering using these for one of my K-90 projects. If I do that then most of the really careful cosmetic work can be skipped as this horn will never be pretty. If I use them on my Holton 345 then I will have my valves "fully optioned out" as car salesmen are wont to say.

The next step was to cut off the knuckles (since many were pretty mangled) and try to duplicate what King has always done, using flared knuckles to the slide tubes. If all your knuckles are cut very short and have a flared end that can act as a connecting ferrule, you have seriously simplified quick assembly of the valve section for the line workers at the factory. Alignment of knuckles in the valve assembly jig is not so crucial, so some slop due to wear means your tooling can be used for much longer because all the knuckles can be hand adjusted as the slide tubes are assembled.

For me it means I can reroute the knuckles to exactly where I want them to go. They can be made to point in any old way you want.

Cool. I like that. And here is how I attempted to copy that feature. (Yeah, I need to redo all of these. I have much more accurate tools now, and can make them exactly how I see them in my head. But for a first attempt using only my eyeball and freehand cuts to the tube stubs, I think this was not too shabby…

Tonight I was posting in Jordan's thread about using sousaphone valve sets on concert tubas. Eventually, I posted way more information that was asked for, as I usually do. Then I worked my way around to how i *wanted* to pin the 4th valve to the 3rd. I posted about some Kanstul junk bin parts I picked up from Kevin at BAC.

That fun box of messed up or passed over partial assemblies, bored valve casings, mouthpiece partial blanks, and random crooks and receivers and such only cost me like $35 shipped, and it truly was a useless pile of parts, unless you were looking to cut them up for some very thick brass stock in various radius sizes. However, there was a partial F tuba piston casing set that was not assembled, but had two casings, two connecting pins and the connecting through-knuckle, all pristine from the lathe/mill and not brazed together.

These connecting pins match those on the York set *very* closely in all details, and the seats for them in the casings are an education as to how piston casings are assembled.

I intend to copy the pins with my lathe and take these parts to a machine shop to see what sort of tooling is needed to recreate the stepped seats for the pins. That way I might be able to do a close-to-factory assembly of my 4th valve, which is worth the money and effort to me because I ACTUALLY THINK THIS STUFF IS FUN TO DO!

Here are two shots of the Kanstul parts nest to a Miraphone 186 rotor for size comparison, and the parts separated.

So that is all I have on this project for now, and likely for some time. I am inviting anyone interested in this stuff to post stories and photos of how they have added a piston casing to a three-piston set. ALL ideas are welcomed here. All discussion or comments are appreciated by me. Please participate if you have ever done this, or post photos of horns you have seen that have a valve set modified in this manner (from a sousaphone or a concert tuba — both are good for this thread).

Do you have a better (or different) method than what i have here? Please share!



Wade

the elephant wrote: ↑Thu Jul 01, 2021 7:43 pm but the thread sleeves on the casings all need to be replaced, and all the caps need their threads chased. Some fit extremely well, and one or two fit like Wisemann caps. (Need I say more?) Generally, most caps fit the best threads well, with one or two being very loose. Most caps were loose on the same casings, too. So some casings are worn down, and some caps are, too. This is all to be expected, and Dan Oberloh will fix all that, when the time comes.

Nice topic. First: I have two thread sleeves (still in place on their casings) that I can spare. Mine are from a top action, but I suspect they'll fit. I'll look at unsoldering them in the semi-near future and send them your way. If they don't fit, you can send them back. Now that I think of it, I might have 3 or 4 total, I'll have a look. I think I can also send you one top cap.

I have a very similar story to yours. My York 712 was originally a 3v front action horn that was built right as, or just after Carl Fischer bought the company. You can visually discern horizontal (side to side) movement between the pistons and casings from wear. I also hemmed and hawed about sending them to Andersons for replating due to A) wanting to wait and graft a fourth on beforehand and B) not sure if the bugle was going to be viable (this was the one that had its bows cut in half).


I bought a York Monster BBb sousaphone (with the same plungers in the bottom caps as yours, pretty sure all of the Monster Sousas did in the 30's) that had a ton of cracks and dreadfully brittle metal, hoping the pistons would swap (NOPE). Then I looked at swapping the sousa cluster for the 712 cluster and transferring the valve tubing. The sousa set had just a bit more angle to it and wouldn't fit in the bugle's gap.

So I sold that sousa set to a very talented repairman out of state, bought it back from him to have another go at fitting it once the bugle bows were brazed back together, then sold it back to him a second time (The man has an incredible amount of patience). Then I was very fortunate that another kind soul allowed me to buy a 4v York Master (B&M) valve set off of their project horn (Thank you yet again).

Back to the 3v York valve cluster that originally came with the horn. I have a top action cluster who's casings match (height and diameter). I am going to attempt to use the #1 from that for the FA set. One port will be in really strange spot (one pointing towards the bell stem like 'normal', the other will point towards the big end of the bottom bow (!).Its a bit weird, but it is what it is. THe casing will match so who am I to complain?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I've grafted a fourth onto two different King 1240 sets. One set went onto a little 15" bell York Eb (used a #1 'backwards) and worked very well. I used a #2 on the other one and it lives on a York model 33 BBb. That one doesn't really have any arch to it but it still fits under my fingers just fine. Both worked out well. Not having any training or skills when these projects started out, it just took a lot of fiddling...fitting and refitting and refitting until everything was just right. I'll post pictures of each valve set tomorrow. This thread has me wanting to get started on the York ones. The casings aren't as tall as the York sousaphone casings. I'll have to have a look at the porting to see if they are as smooth as the ones you have.

Thanks for getting my brain interested in re-starting this project.

My pleasure. I look forward to seeing your pics!

Thanks for the Write-up. I always enjoy reading them!

That’s a SUPER cool project!

The pretty little silver York E-flat - that I fixed up in the 90s, sold, bought back a few years ago, cleaned up, and re-sold features a 4th piston - matched up with the three a valve assembly - that I cut off of a small (same) bore junque York sousaphone.

Some of the threaded sleeves were worn and damaged, but between the small bore sousaphone (actually: two of them) and the tuba itself, I easily came up with four “crisp“ ones.

Later, I did a similar thing with some 36K valves, but never did anything with them. When I started cleaning out incomplete attic projects (that I had lost interest in), that was one of the things that I offered up for sale, and someone bought it. Yes, the #2 casing is usually the one which lines up past #3. As I installed it, I changed out the exit knuckles - so as one was oriented up towards the top of the tuba and the other was oriented down.
Again, I never used it - and really didn’t have a plan, but figured that setting it up like that would offer me some viable options.

Tubing (“tubing” as a verb) clusters like these can add a bit of stress. With the York one - that I described above, I had Secrist rebuild it to the copper stage and send it back to me. I then tubed it, tested it on the instrument (tuning), then sent the valveset back to him to do the nickel and the final lapping. Having him finish that work - after I tubed the cluster - eliminated any stresses caused by me installing the tubing. Once the instrument was completed, I sent the entire instrument back for silver plating. I then lapped the silver plating out of the casings myself (not really necessary), but that job is really easy.

bloke wrote: ↑Fri Jul 02, 2021 7:04 am"junque"

That has been added to my ever-expanding lexicon of technical terms and *will* see some use. Thanks!

My Mom (the quick-witted, beautiful, poised, former-commercial artist person) made up that term in the mid-late 1960's when (after changing majors two or three times, and going on to get a master degree - read: KOLIJ DEFERMENT) my brother (c. age 24) was drafted. Boxes of his crap (left at our house) were labeled by her as "_ _ _ _'s Junque", so they wouldn't be confused (in the attic) with xmas decor.

I actually have better (prettier) pictures of her (from magazine ads, as she did modelling work to pay for her kolij - where she studied with Grant Wood at U of Iowa) but - I'd prefer to only post this "neutral facial expression" one, here...

the elephant wrote: ↑Fri Jul 02, 2021 9:12 am

bloke wrote: ↑Fri Jul 02, 2021 7:04 am"junque"

That has been added to my ever-expanding lexicon of technical terms and *will* see some use. Thanks!

NOW !
BACK TO: Adding a Piston to York Sousaphone Valves

Mr. elephant, what do you typically use to cut the casings?

The few times I've done it, the casing have still been "curved" and unfit for a straight ferrule.

I think you mean the knuckles. The casings are what the pistons go up and down inside. The knuckles are all the little buts of tubing that come out of the casings, some going out to slides and some connecting the casings to one another.

If that is what you mean, I wanted to harvest every bit of these very short tubes that I could from the old casing set when I chopped #2 out of it. To do that I had to use a jeweler's saw, which is like a super-fine hacksaw. The 'kerf" is the thickness of the saw blade, or the amount of material the saw removes as it cuts something into two pieces. The kerf of a Dremel cutoff disc is pretty hefty, on the order of 2 millimeters, and that would have removed too much of the knuckle tube for my taste. The jeweler's saw blades that I used for this have a kerf of about eight thousandths of an inch (.008") and I broke bout ten of them getting the knuckle loose from the other casing.

First I used my Dremel to hack the old casing off of the knuckle. This left the #2 valve with the complete knuckle and a big chunk of the #1 casing still around it.

Then I painstakingly sawed away all the casing material, leaving me with more knuckle length than I had imagined, which was a good thing. I ended up having more than I needed, so I had some room to experiment and trim until I got the fit between the 3rd casing the the #2 casing from the sacrificial valve set.

I also used this saw to cut the alignment pins so they would be as close to full length as I could manage.

Here is a photo from earlier in the thread that shows the end result. The super-fine blade of the jeweler's saw allowed me to cut the knuckle off at the face of the casings, giving me that curved edge on each knuckle. The super-fine blades also allowed me to twist a bit to walk around that curve. The price for this was my breaking about ten of the blades while freeing the two knuckles from the old casings.


This is a jeweler's saw. You can see how fine the blades are. The teeth are almost invisible on the blades I chose for this work.


If you were asking about the sleeve I made to protect the knuckle "stumps" from damage, I used my Dremel tool, some round files, and a set of doming punches and a doming block.


Here is a set of doming tools used by jewelers.


I do not know whether you know what a Dremel tool is, so here is a photo of one.