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I have a school Yamaha sousaphone that is in dire need of a cleaning. I’d like to take use of the detachable valve section so that I can fit it in a tub, But before I do I need to know if where the removable valve section meets the body if there is any sealant. Like mabey a grease or silicone.

Unless you put it in a tub of a cleaning acid - formulated specifically to do a good job on instruments, there’s really no point.

Soap and water will loosen a few chunks, but most people miss the chunks (the majority of them) that are in the difficult-to-access connecting tubing that runs in and out of the valve casings - little pieces of dirt/food that become un-lodged when valves are oiled.

Further, the main problem with most valve sections is that they are coated with lime, and soap and water (alkaline based) will do nothing to remove that.

Quite often, people will bring me an instrument - not always a tuba, maybe a trumpet - that they report to me as needing to be repaired… telling me that they cleaned it first to make sure that it really needed to be repaired, because the valves weren’t working. After I actually cleaned it, everything worked fine.

There are home shortcuts for the proper types of acid that dissolve lime from instruments… shortcuts such as cleaning vinegar, but cleaning vinegar works very slowly, and no end user wants to buy enough gallons of cleaning vinegar to fill a tub with it. Running cleaning vinegar through an instrument with a brush does just about nothing.

I’m not trying to do anything here but to possibly save someone from doing a bunch of work that might not lead to satisfactory results.

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All of that having been said, post responses which don’t answer the questions asked are annoying, so I’m going to attempt to answer your question.

There aren’t many Yamaha sousaphones around here, but since they actually even make them (oddly) bolt together between a couple of the body branches, surely the valve sections also come off. That having been said, my experience with removable valve sections on Yamaha large instruments has never seemed to have been for the convenience of the end-users, but for the convenience of the factory – so that the people who polish the instruments can polish and lacquer smaller portions of them, and then stick them back together.
For this reason, I generally avoid removing Yamaha valve sections from large Yamaha instruments… Little screws and other gadgetry on them tend to end up with stripped heads or just plain stuck - possibly even with factory glued threads.
Most come-apart sousaphones (fiberglass, Taiwanese, etc.) come apart between the fourth and fifth branches, and rely on a pair of O-rings to seal the joint. Yamaha uses O-rings on their bass clarinet bells - instead of joint corks, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t use O-rings on the fourth branches of sousaphones, just as do others… but again, I don’t take them apart.

Thank you. The sousaphone actually doesn’t have really any lime build up or hard scale, it’s just dirty and has gunk(because I play it almost 5-6 hours 5 days a week as well as football games and performances) which I feel is changing the tone since I got it. It has also been a year and a half since it’s gotten professionally cleaned. The problem is that no matter how I orient it, I can’t get the valve assembly to get low enough in a tub for me to do a very basic cleaning with some dish soap. I like to try and do all simple repairs(like broken braces and minor dent work) myself since I have the means and practice to do so, but I just don’t have the space for one of those big tanks/drums to clean a hole sousaphone nor do I really justify buying all those gallons of chemicals.

Look around for a used plastic feed trough.

Any other wisdom on this topic?

There was a question in your post that I failed to notice. Most of the sousaphone slip joints - where valvesets come off, even on the brass Jupiter ones – are sealed with a couple of O-rings. I would predict that Yamaha is the same, even though I’ve never pulled a Yamaha valveset off of a fiberglass or brass Yamaha sousaphone.
The fact that they use O-rings – instead of cork – on bass clarinets tells me that Yamaha is very likely to use O-rings on sousaphones, as does everyone else with removable valvesets.

I fix an absurd number of sousaphones every year, and most of them sport some scale. Most of them don’t end up getting cleaned, because they are brought in to have some damage repaired - with no request of cleaning. If the parts that are supposed to move do move, I just repair what’s asked to be repaired, and go on to the next instrument. Scale not always thick, is often hard to see - unless an instrument is bone dry, and often can be overcome with valve oil and slide grease, but that doesn’t mean that those same valves and slides wouldn’t work better without that small amount of scale on them.

After decades, scale can even work its way around to the large body parts and – combined with repeated dent removal – can contribute to cracking.

If I had to guess at an answer to your question, I would go with "no sealant."

As for cleaning, the ultrasonic tank is your friend. You will not replicate the results in your tuba. Unless you do a chem clean, which can be potentially damaging for DIY-ers...

Anyway, keep on playing!

Sealant is used but a little heat will allow you to pull it out with no issue. When reassembling, use a light bead of silicone to seal. Not required but we do it here in the shop.

… so, the same stuff as used on a Yamaha saxophones - to attach the stack to the bottom bow, then…??

Okay, I am no expert but I have gotten decent results with first cleaning from the leadpipe to the start of the tuning slide with a 3 step approach on my Yamaha: clean/degrease with dishwashing detergent and a snake brush, then soak the same section in vinegar (pour it down the leadpipe, really scrubbing hard in all the valve knuckles (soak the slides and valves in vinegar) then neutralise with baking soda and water. Not as good as a pro job ,but you don’t need to unscrew anything and it only costs a few bucks. I don’t live close to a someone willing to work on Tubas, so I have to use the above method or drive for hours.

Next time I do it I will use Blokes suggestion and put a rubber stoppers in the leadpipe end and soak it in vinegar for longer

bloke wrote: ↑Mon Aug 22, 2022 8:10 pm … so, the same stuff as used on a Yamaha saxophones - to attach the stack to the bottom bow, then…??

I don't do much woodwind work, but I think we see more sax joints sealed with epoxy instead of silicone. We have both around for whatever the tech chooses to use.

That’s interesting that Yamaha uses goop to connect the valve section to the fiberglass body, even though they use O-rings (rather than cork) on bass clarinet joints.

The glue that Yamaha uses on the saxophones doesn’t seem to loosen very well at all with heat. When we rarely find the need to take them apart, we sort of have to work them apart. It doesn’t seem to be a brittle type of glue - like epoxy, but it doesn’t seem to melt with heat.

This having been said, I haven’t taken apart any of the newer Chinese Yamaha saxophones, so I have no idea if they’re still using the same type of glue as they were using in Japan.

If I ever find that I must take a valve section off of a Yamaha sousaphone – and it’s glued as reported, I hope it’s not the stuff they use on saxophones.

Bloke nails this: Yamaglue



No O-rings, no grease, pain in the butt to get detached. I will be scraping/sanding the tenon, throwing some grease on it upon time to reassemble.

Yamasnot…

yeah...

(again) I do NOT remove Yamaha valvesets (at least not where the Yama-screws and Yama-gadgets are located)...UNLESS I want to struggle to get something apart, struggle to get something back together, and then struggle to get the valves working (again).

I'm about 99% certain that their "removable valvesets are for the convenience of those who polish/lacquer the instruments, and not as some "favor" to "us techs".