Help! Beginner Soldering Supplies Needed.

[Sousaswag]

Okay, here's the deal.

I've been wanting to try my hand at doing some of my own work for a long time now. I read through all of Joe's, Wade's, and other's posts so many times over and it all fascinates me.

I just purchased a boatload of Holton 345 parts. Enough to make my own 340 into a 345, and have another playable bell-front 350. All the parts are there. Leadpipes, braces, branches, all of it. I will detail more when I receive them.

I want to try putting the lesser of the two (the bell front) tubas together.

I have a complete JUNK Pan-Am Eb here that I'll be using as my practice sacrificial lamb. It is complete junk. Valves have no plating left, the leadpipe is completely F'd, it's got leaks, cracks, all of it.

Now, the Holton 345 parts are all bare brass. Keith Polito will be doing the dent work on both of these, and I will probably ask for his help with the 4 piston set, but I feel like the lesser of the two tubas is something I'd like to take on.

What would you (I'm going to call you EXPERTS) recommend I pick up to begin soldering braces, tubing, and body joints?

Torches
What type of solder
Scrapers
Flux
Anything else?

Please, don't hate me for wanting to try this. If I screw something up, Keith lives right down the road. I think this will be a really great project for me. I am so excited to have been lucky enough to get these parts.

[gocsick]

Complete amateur so the actual experts might speak differently. I help the local high school out with some maintenance and resoldering broken braces etc.

I use a basic 70-30 solder I Bought from Ferree's. For flux I use Johnson's original soldering fluid. I have it for other projects and saw that they sold it at Ferree's so I figured it must be good for Brass instruments. I like it because it isn't active at low temperatures but does a great job cleaning when it gets hot.

For a torch. I had a small propane pencil torch that was part of my breathing and gas welding setup.. but honestly I found s butane soldering torch from harbor freight more useful. The heat output is much less. It of course takes longer to hear the joint but for a beginner I think that is better. Less likely to overheat and burn off laquer.

https://www.harborfreight.com/butane-mi ... 63170.html

Other tools, like scrapers and burnishers I already had. I dont have any dent tools and I haven't ever tried to to do any dent work.

[arpthark]

@Sousaswag I have lots of spare parts, a spare roll of 50/50 solder, and random stuff I'm happy to pass along for the cost of shipping. I'm not sure about how to legally and safely ship liquid flux, but I have a huge bottle of Ferree's stuff that I'll probably never use all of in my lifetime unless my hobby turns into a real business.

I'm totally in your boat. I taught myself to do basic assembly/disassembly and also have become decent with dent balls and making reasonably clean solder joints (though they aren't all zingers). For soldering fluid, I started out using Rubyfluid which I bought at Ace Hardware. I began using brushes for it but ended up using q-tips or a needle dropper to apply it more precisely. I use a regular propane torch for 99% of what i do, but also have an air-acetylene setup that was gifted to me. I do have a smaller tip that gives me a little more control of the flame for propane. I am very conservative with heat and have avoided burning any lacquer badly (except for this wicked tight Miraphone ferrule I couldn't remove the other day).

You'll probably want some soldering clips/wires or something like that, too. I use bike spoke wire bent into a shape I need, regular wire I found somewhere, or a couple sets of the Ferree's clips depending on how big the thing is. Never soldered tuba bows back together so I'm not any help with that.

I'm a rank amateur so none of this advice may be valid, but it's what's worked for me as I've been weekend-warrior-ing this stuff for the past couple years while keeping my day job.

[LeMark]

this is by far my favorite flux

https://www.forneyind.com/forney-38120- ... ounce-bulk

Butane torch for small things
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Bernzomatic ... /301134308

I have a larger soldering head for large areas, with both propane and MAP gas

I find a dremel tool with sanding bits and cutting wheels is invaluable for working with parts.

[bloke]

I use the watery looking clear flux with a cardboard (never plastic) Q-tip and an upside down rattle can paint lid. You guys always have known that I'm very high tech.

I use tin and lead solder that's not anywhere close to an 8th of an inch thick, and maybe it's a 16th of an inch thick, but not smaller. Mrs. bloke likes really small stuff but to me it melts too quickly and it's hard to control when holding it up to something. I have used no-lead solder when the situation was dire and I just ran out of solder, and I didn't have much trouble with it. I didn't like it particularly, but I got it to work.

You might be shocked at what I use to solder with - as far as the torch, I use 14 oz (supposedly) disposable camping propane bottles that I refill from my barbecue propane (via one of those new refill gadgets that you can buy). I screw on this Bernzomatic head that has a button start and adjusts all the way down from what I call heat painting all the way up to brazing. I can use the same torch head for everything and paint heat on already soldered joints and I can anneal things red hot in almost no time at all. I'm not tethered to a oxygen or acetylene bottle. Never felt the need to have a pencil point flame, and actually I find a flame concentrated in that small area to be a hindrance.

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Solder things together that don't matter.

Solder things together that are dirty and use flux and a Q-tip over and over again and heat to burn the dirt out from underneath the dirty joints. That way you can learn how to solder things together that are dirty or someone did something stupid with glue or sticky stuff and it's just too much trouble to take a whole bunch of other things apart in order to solder that one joint. Of course, spend most of your time soldering together clean joints and developing a feel for the heat and how to point the heat to the part of the joint that needs the heat.
Mrs. bloke's soldering is just fine, but when there's something that's pretty tricky she comes and asked me to do it, just like I have her do things for me at which she is better.

If soldering was not second nature to me, there would still be a barn full of repair work out there, and I just finished the last of a mountain of instruments for a formidable list of middle and high schools just before dinner.

I go into the hardware store and see all this newer technology plumbing stuff for people who can't solder - or apparently can't even glue - and I can't help but look askance.

[bloke]

I use the traditional three cornered scraper that you'll see for sale on band instrument repair websites, but a lot of times I just grab whatever is close so I don't have to stand up and walk across the room. Think of a diamond shaped flange. I might just heat one side of the flange where solder is too plentiful, and - while it's hot - run a screwdriver blade along that edge and fling that excess solder off the instrument. You've got to be absolutely aware of the temperature of your metal and of your solder to do silly stuff like that... but non-traditional techniques can sure speed things up. Sometimes - if the contour is convex enough, I might just take a file and file solder off of an edge like that - if I can manage to do it without filing metal away from the instrument itself other than on the very edge of the flange. I use a lot of "whatever is on the floor next to my chair" stuff to do things. That having been said, I tend to have a lot of things on the floor next to my chair.
I believe that I approach this work in the same way that I approach playing. I'm very results-oriented, rather than method-oriented. Sandpaper, preparation, tinning surfaces... those are probably the equivalent of long tones and mouthpiece buzzing.

[LeMark]

For Someone that has added 5th valves to several instruments and built two Frankentubas, I still feel some aspects of soldering are voodoo

Cleanly Solder together 2 parallel tubes? Witchcraft

Unsolder a bottom bow without burning every bit of lacquer 6 inches on each side? Impossible

Silver soldering in general? Tried it... The results are not pretty

Solder anything at all and not at least discoloring the lacquer? Still haven't managed it

[Sousaswag]

Luckily, the 345 carcass I'm building into the model 350 appears to already be soldered together. It is also all raw brass. So is the 4v piston set that I'll be building to put on my model 340, along with all of it's slide tubes.

I'm not sure that even if I were up to it, that I would be willing or able to take on the challenge of putting together one of these cattywampus 345's without proper knowledge, training, or tools. I will likely leave that and the dent work to my good buddy Keith.

Now, I am pretty sure I can learn to detach braces, clean them up, and pull a valveset off of one tuba to mate to another. I'll see if I can do the tubes on the 4v piston set as well, but I'm going to do ALL the learning on the Pan-Am POS and the 345 carcass.

I believe I will also be able to solder that recording bell stack to the bottom bow of the carcass.

That little Pan-Am is silver plated. At least, what's left of it was. I'm very glad that I'm not at all concerned about cosmetics on that one or on the 350. Makes things a LOT easier.

I'll take a ride over to some stores tomorrow and see what I can get my hands on. I do have a good set of tools... Not specifically meant for instrument repair, but I do a lot of automotive work and have drawers of random pliers, screwdrivers, files, etc, etc.

The big thing I need to decide on is the torch setup, as there will probably be a bunch of soldering I'm about to be doing.

[bloke]

Soldering tubes together parallel involves experience and simple arithmetic. Experience tells us how many thousands of an inch something is likely to shrink after it cools based on it's mass, and arithmetic tells us where to set the end of the pair of tubes that's likely to move closer together upon cooling.

Sometimes I get it on the nose, sometimes it takes me two or three tries, and when it takes me 10 tries is when I invent new cuss words, because I'm pretty impatient.

Trombone slide tubes move together even more radically than a pair of braced tuning slide tubes. People think I do pretty nice trombone slides. With them not only are the things previously outlined factors, but there's also a tendency for the tubes to get pulled together in the middle and become knock kneed, so the person putting the slide together needs to be aware of these additional forces and avoid that. One of the best ways to avoid this phenomenon is to get in and out quickly.

In another thread, someone just blamed Anderson Silver Plating for not hiring someone to do valves. They tried. People today don't want to learn a craft. They don't really even want a job. They just want money to buy their stuff. This is obvious to us when we look at what has happened to the build quality of American instruments which are still being made - and even the design changes involved in them (which are workarounds for lack of skill). Even those arch braces that support lower mouthpipes on sousaphones are one of these workarounds. People used to think of their work and their skill sets is the main part of their life and their definitions of themselves. Today people think of their vacations as their real life and the rest of their life as their pseudo life. I embrace work as my real life, and view playing gigs - which is actually more work (yet I come home without being filthy dirty) - as little mini vacations.

[matt g]

One thing I’d note, based on @bloke’s posts and my own experience is that those big Hilton’s might not play nice when being merged.

Although the idea of “interchangeable parts” has been around since before the Industrial Revolution, this concept is/was a bit foreign to these large scale tubas (that don’t sell in large quantities).

[bloke]

Older Holton 6/4 tubas large upper bows were more than an inch wider (regarding to tracing around the outsides of them) the the 345 tubas' large upper bows.

I suspect that Holton altered this bow (when moving to the 340/345 instruments) to make that part more like the York C version (as it was important to put a C version in Mr. Jacobs' hands, so that they could say that the principal brass of the CSO all "play/own" Holton instruments.

[Sousaswag]

I’m not changing bows at all. I’m just putting a (all Holton) 4 valve set on mine with all Holton slide tubes.

I will then move the 3 piston set to the carcass when everything is ready to go.

I very likely won’t be doing anything with my “good” 340. I will leave all that to a professional.

[bloke]

LOL...
' already off the rails...

Who else has soldering supplies recommendations for this gentleman...??

[Mary Ann]

Since we're off the rails anyway and all my soldering is with electronic equipment -- if you use lead core solder and you inhale the fumes (ANY of the fumes) you're raising your internal lead levels and lead is toxic. EDTA chelation will get it back out, and hopefully before you get drain bamage.
And nope I'm not ever going to try to solder any part of a tuba, even if I could lift it. Even though I am good at the electronics.

Edit: I don't think I meant lead core. I meant lead solder.

[bloke]

I don't enjoy finger wagging, but lead doesn't become gaseous unless it's heated to over 3000° F., and I don't think many of us have the equipment to do that. What will screw you up is the acid fumes from the flux. If you're not going to have ventilation, for pity sake keep your nose out of the way and put off inhaling until those fumes float up to the ceiling - which they will do, because they are hot.
A lot of solder is more tin than lead, and it doesn't boil until it's somewhere upwards of 5000° F.

[gocsick]

I'm with @bloke on this one. The vapor pressure of pure molten lead at 1000 degrees C is about 2 mmhg. Atmospheric pressure is 760 mmhg. The vapor pressure of lead in solder is significantly lower due to the the thermodynamics of alloys (regular solution theory for any chemists).

Vapor pressure of pure metals
https://www.powerstream.com/vapor-pressure.htm

I am much more concerned with breathing organic solvents and acid fumes than I am about lead containing solder.

[bloke]

Even worse than inhaling acid fumes is when some idiot super glued a solder joint, it's basically clear in color and not easily detected, of course it popped loose, and then we start heating it - perceiving that it's just an open solder joint.

[arpthark]

Even worse than inhaling acid fumes is when some idiot super glued a solder joint, it's basically clear in color and not easily detected, of course it popped loose, and then we start heating it - perceiving that it's just an open solder joint.

Cyanoacrylate glue is horrible. Not as dangerous (I hope) but quite stinky is something I've found on old instruments I've disassembled, where some joints are held together by a sort of whitish/tan epoxy. Gosh, that stuff burns and stinks.

I found a combination of that whitish/tan epoxy stuff and a very hot-melting solder (maybe the lead-free stuff, not sure) on this silver Miraphone 186 I have been working on. Thankfully I was able to avoid burning any silver.

On an old Carl Fischer "Reliable" Eb helicon, I actually found that epoxy stuff hidden underneath a flange that still had the factory lacquer/no evidence of prior disassembly. Corners cut?

I guess the point of this thread derailment is, when you are taking apart instruments, expect the unexpected, especially if it looks like it's been fixed in dad's garage.

[bloke]

There's more derailment:

I believe I mentioned that - this summer - I encountered some welding that was obviously done by someone's dad.

What was kind of amazing was that they didn't burn any holes in the instrument, and the welds actually held the things together that needed to be held together. That's the first time I've ever seen successful welding on a brass instrument. My hat goes off to that father.

[Mary Ann]

Welp I got lead poisoning somewhere. I'm not aware of anything I did other than soldering and being a gas station jockey back in the leaded gas days. With the volatility info just presented, it is a bit of a conundrum because I doubt I ate paint in my younger days. Not a problem now because I got rid of it -- but hmm.