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Thinking back a half century...Had I known what was out there, I believe I would have (though the former would have been EXPENSIVE and - particularly with really good intonation as is @tubaing's - ELUSIVE...as well as a good chance of craptastic assembly) tried to luck into a Holton BB-345 (with a custom-added fifth rotor) and (my same) F tuba (4+2 handmade B&S)...

...but both models were (in the mid-70's) devilishly inconstant (with the F model sort of in its earlier development stages - vs. mine which was made in the early 80's), and hardly any were available of either the Holton (not to mention the custom 5th-rotor add-on, of which there were none) or the B&S - certainly (again) not in the USA in the mid-1970's, when they were JUST BEGINNING to trickle into the USA.

Even Miraphone 186 C tubas with 5 rotors (much less with good overtone series - ie. not requiring octave-lower valve combinations) were fairly hard to come by.

I can think of a whole bunch of other stuff available "back then" (that others swoon over) which wouldn't interest me (today) in the least (avoiding mentioning any of them, to avoid insulting anyone's else beloved instruments).

There are more tubas - today - that are easier to play in-tune...but the overwhelming majority of them are more work to play in other ways (typically: not enough resistance built into them).

...the random thoughts/remembrances of an old fart who still plays, all these years later

I enjoy my Holton. I do wonder what makes some more in-tune than others.

What really gets me is that flat open F. If I could fix that, I’d be REALLY happy.

I agree with your points, though. I will say, when made well, there’s nothing else quite like them available today. (The Holtons)

Kevin's is pretty amazing in that regard. It's just about like a 186 - as far as the F being okay, the upper F not being very sharp, and the D and D-flat not being very flat. Also, his low B-flat is also not particularly sharp at all.

I'm sure that one of the main things that attracts me to this model 98 Miraphone is because the bell is virtually a complete trace of the 345 bell, so the sound is really similar, and with the 98 mouthpipe being so long and the valve set being farther down the instrument, I really don't notice the really large bore size on this instrument compared to the regular large .750" bore on the 345... and - well - the tuning with the 98 is a walk in the park.

I wonder what the reason is for the (again, particularly annoying) flat F that so many Conn/Holton tubas suffer from. Since you took Kevin's apart and put it back together and the good tendencies remained, that tells me the weirdness isn't in any of the big (maybe leaky) body joints, then?

Conventional wisdom tells us too-big mouthpipes and tapers affect pitch and response, right? I wonder if that's where the weirdness is.

I say all of that as somebody who does NOT repair or create instruments for a living, merely curious about why these are so inconsistent.

Interesting post. Next month will be exactly 50 years since I bought my first tuba. Miraphone 186 C, 5 valve. Been modified some since then, but still my favorite and easiest to play. Took about a month to work out the slide pulls, but since then, intonation is rock solid.