“A water cooler fell on my son’s Bach trumpet“

[bloke]

I just got a text from a professional trumpet (player (one and a half hours away) whose son is now also playing.
Apparently, they are on the way here now at 8:15 PM.
I warned them about the deer running in front of their car.
They said they would be careful.
——————
I basically abused my mower today (which is finally completely repaired - a bunch of 16-year-old worn out parts had to be replaced… and I couldn’t afford to pay John Deere to do it, so…) and used it to defacto bush hog down the two feet of grass (I’m doing about an acre of the property at a time) down to 2 inches (painstakingly cutting it in stages and blowing all of the thatch off into the woods). Then, I ran 250 feet of hose (after cutting another area down to the dirt with the big mower), laid about two hundred fifty square feet of sod in an area, adjusted the sprinkler to water it in, oh yeah: and I also repaired the messed up threads on a custom French horn today while another professional player waited.
The high today here was 97°.
I guess it’s not time to go to bed yet.
While that guy is driving here with the smashed trumpet, I am laying in bed drinking coffee and watching Rockford Files.

[York-aholic]

It doesn’t get much better than this.

Honest work and putting a smile on the face of others, then a good night’s sleep.

[bloke]

LOL…
11:37 PM and he has come and gone.
I found out that this was not the “good“ Bach but the “marching“ Bach… but the son has a big solo in the marching band show, so it needed to be repaired quickly.

The bell was squashed flat up by the receiver brace, and the bell bow was folded over.

It’s all straightened out nicely without unsoldering anything (homespun techniques that work, but which I doubt any others employ - were these techniques even to occur to them), and I pushed out a few other little dents here and there. If someone sights down the bell and mouthpipe, both of them look straight, smooth, and round again. All the valves work again, and the #1 slide works again.

I’m going to pretend like I stayed up late and watched Perry Mason (and got paid to watch it), and I’m going to go to sleep now.

[Three Valves]

MDs get all the glory.

There should be a musical instrument repair ER show on TV.

I'd watch.

[Tubajug]

MDs get all the glory.

There should be a musical instrument repair ER show on TV.

I would watch too!

[Charlie C Chowder]

Lots of stuff on Youtube.


CCC

[bloke]

If anything is surely worse than tuba solos, it’s got to be band instrument repair videos.

[royjohn]

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall to have watched those "homespun" techniques!

I'll bet if bloke hadn't been performing for an audience, he would have been watching Perry Mason while working on that horn!
royjohn, tuba newbie who uses "homespun" performance techniques...LOL

[bloke]

How about

“tapping down the high ridges of a squashed .462” bore straight portion of a bell trumpet bell section - after the bow - with a buffed smooth concave side of the handle of some old broken pliers, but actually tapping on that broken polished pliers handle with a hard plastic mallet”…??

bloke “Don’t scoff at it, until you’ve seen the results… and - if I told you how I straighten a trumpet bell bow back up in line with the rest of the bell (nothing unsoldered) - you would probably stare at the ceiling even more.”

[iiipopes]

Paul Beckerdite. A person nobody knows, but he owned the music store where I grew up when I was growing up. Great tech. One time the band director brought in a bari sax that had been dropped, causing everything to bind solid. Conventional wisdom was write it off. The band director and the factory rep were in his shop to survey the damage and possible fixes. In a cheeky moment, Paul said, "Here's how we do things..." He took a drum stick, put it in the top of the stack, felt which way it warped, turned it over, and whacked the part of the drumstick sticking out on his work bench. The blow exactly realigned and fixed the warp; all the keys worked; no binding anywhere; and they put the sax back in the case and took it back to the school where it continued for several years after that. Yes, it was unplanned. No, nobody expected anything since the rep had already written the horn off. Nobody had anything to lose since it was considered a write-off. One-in-a-million. But sometimes providence is a good thing.

The point of this digression: I am always appreciative about whatever it takes to fix a musical instrument, in whatever context, especially after having to make a couple of repairs myself way back when on my son's friend's horn who their parents simply could not afford to take in. I am convinced from all the techs I have worked with over the years that the greater part of being a good tech is a good imagination and clarity of vision on what the outcome needs to be.

[bloke]

...as well as being able to accurately imagine the bad consequences of a bad idea.