I don’t know what it is about these particular instruments, but – including the sousaphones – they seem to arrive here with BOTH their casings AND their pistons bent.
This stuff is not exciting to readers of the repair/modification forum, and it is certainly not exciting to me…but this is a typical day in the life of a repair guy.
I just don’t think I’m going to be able to broom all five of these instruments off my bench before lunch, and they may take all day…(??)
Yesterday, I was presented with a B&S-made (early “Accent”) knock off of a Bach 42 open wrap trombone with a lightweight slide.
Somehow, I managed to get that horrible (HORRIBLE!!!) slide working pretty darn good without taking it completely apart and doing all the things that I would typically expect to have to do. in fact, I didn’t even have to throw the outside slide tubes in the trash.
after about an hour, I realized that it was probably a playing slide that would rate a 92 to 93, could not be made any better than that without throwing the outside slide tubes in the trash, would surely be torn up again, and it was time to stop.
I was told to only repair the slide and the rotor, so that’s all I did. Had I spent five or eight minutes doing some free bell dent removal, I might have been accused of doing work not requested and overcharging.
I am remembering – though – that I cannot (unless I’m not particularly interested in buying food or fuel) charge the types of prices that I charged prior to 2020, as – due to “11% inflation” (and common core math) – everything costs twice as much.
Again: Most the time, fixing horns is just a job.
The pretty good thing about yesterday and today:
very little buffing
, and – even though I was feeling a little bit ill (perhaps from some Thanksgiving day minor cooties-sharing) - I felt well enough (and not all that exhausted) that I was able to pick up the big B-flat tuba and practice for a couple of hours between 9 and 11:30 or so at night. I worked on stuff that is sort of hard: 1/ playing Bach (in the basement register of the tuba) - attempting to make it sound musical and interesting WITHOUT over-romanticizing NOR over-rubato-ing it, and 2/ playing through some particularly loud orchestral excerpts - striving to mash the right buttons for B-flat tuba, and to not play sharp.