marching band trombones

[bloke]

Yesterday, I fixed up three (yep) marching band trombones. I fix them up every year, and they're always in rough shape again, and I have to straighten them all back out. The three are a gold brass Bach 50G bass trombone with an axial flow valve, an Elkhart vintage Conn 72H bass trombone, and a 1970s Bach 42B trombone.

It just seems to me that pawn shop beginner trombones - with a half inch bore and with slides that works ($600?) - would be just as suitable, wouldn't have put so much wear and tear on instruments that were formally worth a total of about $10,000, and would offer a little brighter sound, which would have carried more when played outdoors.

The Bach bass trombone's case has a bunch of cute stickers all over it featuring pictures of tennis shoes. The humidity, though, has caused all the little stickers to curl up.

The 42B bell section was curved and twisted this year, and the F slide and its braces were loose in the case. The main tuning slide was too out of alignment for that slide to move.

I don't know where they found the vintage Conn bass to buy.
When I first saw it a few years ago, the original case was still in remarkable condition. (Some of you may have noticed that I'm sort of a fan of original cases.) After a year or two they tore it all up. I found them a nice new Conn bass trombone case on eBay for a hundred bucks (I'm guessing that the seller bought a new Conn and decided to buy a bag for it...??) that had gold anodized combination lock latches. The case is still holding up that I found for them, but they've torn the latches all up, so I had to pry them off and replace them with draw bolt latches yesterday.

This time of year is pretty good on the bank account, but sort of hard on the heart. On the news crawl yesterday, I saw that 173 shots were fired next to a gas station in Memphis near where I used to fill up fairly often. https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/polic ... 7a584.html It's near a favorite railroad crossing where some high school buddies and I used to love to wait for L&N locomotives ( https://www.condrenrails.com/MRP/Memphi ... 1165...JPG ) to pass through, as we were rail fans. That type of thing is some of the most high profile symptoms of societal decay, but I'm confronted with some of the less noticeable ones, each summer.

[bloke]

Even good trombones go to bad places.

[bone-a-phone]

Swap out those vintage horns for Yamaha 354s. Or Olds Ambassadors, worth about $200 each and much better suited for the purpose. Likely they will never even know.

Single valve basses often go cheap, so they get sacrificed up to what ever instrument hating demon they put in kids these days. Especially those snap moves in marching really can wreck a trombone in one move.

[bloke]

Yes to all, but they're not mine.
They don't even belong to my state, but as as high as the percentage is of the amount that the federal government controls funding for education, we all paid for those instruments.

People take marching band very seriously. As rare as leisure time is for me, I take picnics very seriously, but I don't toss my wife's fine china into my picnic basket.

[arpthark]

Swap out those vintage horns for Yamaha 354s. Or Olds Ambassadors, worth about $200 each and much better suited for the purpose. Likely they will never even know.

Single valve basses often go cheap, so they get sacrificed up to what ever instrument hating demon they put in kids these days. Especially those snap moves in marching really can wreck a trombone in one move.

Funny, as I have an Olds Ambassador for sale right now for $200. Sturdy little thing!

[bloke]

Possibly, the best strategy (trumpets/trombones/flutes/clarinet/saxes - as school systems are now expected to provide these) would be for a school system warehouse to contain a bunch of Walmart instruments, and - if a flute/clarinet/trumpet/trombone needed more then $60 of repair work - or a sax needed more than $150 of repair work - put it on an auction site, and pull another one out of the warehouse.

bloke "Everything else - now - is disposable, and 'students' are doing really effective jobs of disposing of (school bid pricing) $800 NOT-made-in-Japan flutes/clarinets/trumpets/trombones and NOT-made-in-Japan $1800 saxes...
...Additionally, back-o'-store 'tech's' - often - aren't particularly technical."