Vintage Conn Bari Sax octave mechanism

I just finished a major overhaul of this vintage Conn bari sax. 

It was about 100 years old, and as such had some quirks in its design. Aside from the fact that it only went up to High Eb, it had a convoluted octave mechanism, which seems to be par for the course on these old saxes. Unfortunately, no two models I've seen have the same mechanism, so every time I work on one I have to re-learn how to set it up. This time, though, I took notes. When setting up this particular style of mechanism, corks should be installed on each point in the order shown. Notes on each point are below the picture.

Cork 1 is just an articulation cork on the lower octave key. The pad isn't visible in this picture, but it's on the other end of that arm. It should be installed first, and should be pretty thin. I used .4mm cork.

Cork 2 is another simple articulation cork that's barely visible in the picture. The arm it's on is the arm that connects the G key with the octave mechanism. It should also be pretty thin, and again I used .4mm.

Cork 3 holds the upper octave key closed when the octave touchpiece isn't pressed (i.e., on any note below middle C#). There's a piece of teflon there, too, to ensure smooth movement on what is a very small contact area. Its thickness will vary. It just needs to be thick enough to hold that upper octave key closed. I ended up using 1.0 mm cork.

Cork 4 holds the lower octave key close when the octave touchpiece isn't pressed (again, any note below middle C#)

• Corks 3 and 4 are mounted on the same arm, so their thicknesses are dependent on each other. That doesn't mean the corks should be the same size, but it does mean that, once you establish the thickness of cork 3, you need to carefully select a thickness for cork 4. It needs to hold the lower octave key closed without raising the arm, which would cause the upper octave key to open slightly. As you can see, it ended up needing to be pretty thick.

Cork 5 closes the upper octave key when the octave touchpiece IS depressed, but the G key is closed (for notes between middle D and High G#). Because of the design of this instrument, the G key and upper octave key are actually regulated to each other, meaning that when this mechanism is engaged, they both must hit their tone holes at exactly the same time. A cork that's too thick will prevent the G key from closing (and not just on notes that use the octave key. It won't ever be able to close). A cork that's too thin will allow the upper octave key to open on the notes between middle D and High G#.

This mechanism is made more complicated by the fact that that upper octave key pip is on the neck, meaning that the pip itself moves when the neck is rotated, while the key remain stationary. Different players like to have the neck set in different positions, so there's an inherent challenge in making sure the pad always covers the pip. The original neck tenon had a spud on it that fit into some sort of slot on the socket to prevent the neck from being twisted too far out of alignment. Unfortunately that slot was long gone, and had been replaced with a poorly soldered piece of brass rod. I ended up replacing the tenon and socket because both were severely out-of-round and damaged. When replacing them, I made a new slot out of the lip plate from a flute and installed it on the socket. I also installed a spud on the new tenon. I don't know how closely the "slot" matches with the original set-up since I didn't have an original to work from, but it was effective in allowing the neck to be rotated a little bit while ensuring that the pad is always covering the pip.

Here's the old tenon and socket:

And just to show the difference, here are before and after shots of that top bow:

You can see that the missing plating under socket and the crappy solder work on the bow-body joint were both there from previous repairs. I also ended replacing the brace that's partially visible in the first picture running between the socket and body. At some point that brace was damaged and lost one of its flanges, but instead of repairing or replacing it someone just globbed solder all over it. I replaced it with a brace from our scrap pile that's visible in the second picture at the bottom of the neck bow. That position is more solid and safer than having the brace attached to the neck socket, which can easily be damaged by the brace pushing into it or pulling on it if the instrument gets whacked.

19th Century Eb Alto Horn - Tubing Repair

Today I got to work on this beauty:

It's an Eb alto horn, made between 1876 and 1884. A customer of ours regularly brings in instruments of that vintage that he plays in a Civil War re-enactor band. This one needed a couple of things: First, the bell wire was loose and needed to be soldered in place to keep it from buzzing, and second, the piece of tubing that connects the main tuning slide to the first valve casing was split. On older instruments like this, the tubing is made from a flat sheet of brass with the edges folded up and brazed together, and that seam is what split on this tube. Unfortunately, I neglected to take a before picture, but it looked something like this:

One way to deal with this is to solder a brass patch over the split, which someone had already done on an area of the tube that had split previously. I could have done that, but the first patch didn't stop the split from advancing, and I suspect that a second patch would have only been a temporary fix as well. The better option, then, was to remove the tube from the instrument and rebraze the seam for a more permanent, and practically invisible, repair. After unsoldering the tube from the instrument, I removed and discarded the old patch, removed the excess solder, cleaned up the surface, and brazed the seam with silver solder in exactly the way it would have been done at the factory. Here's a picture of the tube immediately after brazing. The solder is the silver-colored stuff that's pooled on top. It's extremely hard and strong, but has to be very hot to melt - about 1200 degrees. The pink discoloration is a byproduct of the brass being heated to such a high temperature. If you look closely at the end of the red arrow, the line you can see is the seam. The wire is just there to hold the seam shut during brazing.

After brazing, there's a lot of gunk that forms on the surface from the metal being exposed to such high temperatures, so the part gets dipped in an acid bath to remove that stuff. Then the excess solder has to be ground off and smoothed. This picture was taken during that process. Some of the heat varnish remains on the underside of the tube.

Here's another shot, taken further along in the process after sanding. The seam is again barely visible at the end of the arrow.

 Finally, after buffing and scratch-brushing, it's ready to go back on the instrument. I scratch brushed it to take away the high shine that buffing leaves, to better match the rest of the instrument, which is 100+ year old raw brass.

Here it is mounted back on the instrument!

Again, from above.

 It's incredibly satisfying to resurrect an instrument that's been around for so long, even though I really didn't have to do that much. It plays great, and will hopefully continue to serve for many years.

Daily Lesson - 10/7/13

When replacing a flute head cork, always remove dents from the head joint before checking the fit of the cork. Dents will give a false sense of tightness, but once the cork slips past the dent it may prove to be loose. I ruined two corks before I realized that. But the third cork? Well, that one was juuust right.

Sometimes you're the pigeon...

and sometimes you're the statue. And some kid clearly beat this trumpet with a giant bronze pigeon.

That's part of the bottom cap there on the middle casing. The kid managed to break the cap part away from the collar and squish the bottom of the casing into an oval. 

Diagnosis: Beyond repair. Probably would have been an easy fix, too, if the kid hadn't tried to take matters into his own hands/channel lock pliers.

Flute Padding Addendum

Inevitably there are strange exceptions to the padding process I use. A bad pad that's too lumpy or has imperfections in the skin won't respond properly to shimming, and could eat up a lot of time, so they typically need to be discarded or repurposed. Sometimes a tone hole is so far out of level that the pad will only hit in one spot, and in that case the front-back relationship has to wait until that aberration can be address with half- or three-quarter-shims. Occasionally when tone holes are out of level I will file them, though lately I've been moving away from that. I find that, even after filing a tone hole, the imperfections in a pad can still be enough to require just as much partial shimming as might be required on an unfiled tone hole (although in different thicknesses and in different places on the pad.) In most cases, the extra investment of time spent filing seems not to save enough time in padding. I may revert to filing tone holes in the future, but for now I think the shimming technique is improving as I force myself to work with the unaltered, unlevel tone holes. Another 30 to 40 years, and I'm sure I'll have it figured out.

Shimming Flute Pads

I do a lot of flute repads. I don't know if that's because I'm picky about working with old pads, or whether flute pads wear out more frequently than those on other instruments. But it means I spend a lot of time thinking about pads and how they seal.
Flute pads are held in with some sort of retainer that attaches to the middle of the pad cup, or chimney in the case of open hole pads. Because of that, instead of being floated on a bed of glue, they're shimmed up with little paper washers that are known as, uh, "shims." There are people who ask why they're not glued, and the answer to that is that it's always been done with shims and glue won't work and who the hell do you think you are questioning these techniques and shut up because I've been doing this for 40 years and there can't possibly be a better way than what I learned in 1970.
At least, that's the answer I've seen whenever it's brought up. The 1970's must've been a golden age for the instrument repair industry. That's evidently when they came up with the right techniques for every repair.
But I use shims because the tone holes aren't level and neither are the pads, so shimming is necessary to make pad interface properly with the tone hole and seal it. You can get very picky with shimming, and some people do - cutting sections of shims and gluing them to the back of the pad to "boost" a particular area of the pad that may be leaking. Some say this is a waste of time, and others say it's necessary to achieve a firmly level pad. I firmly believe it's necessary, althoughsome people get a little out of hand with it. You can only do so much to correct the imperfections of - let's not put on airs - cow guts stretched over sheep fur.
But to go back three paragraphs to the point of this post - leveling flute pads gives you time to think. And a conclusion I came to recently is that the front-to-back relationship is, without a doubt, the most important part of leveling flute pads. Miss that, and it doesn't matter how carefully you level the rest of the pad, you'll never get either the response or feel you want.
Imagining the pad like a compass, North would be the back, where the key arm is. South, then, would be the area of the pad furthest from the arm - the part that you inevitably get dirty when you polish your flute. If a pad is too thin, it will hit the tone hole at South, but not at North, resulting in a leak at the back. This pad might have a nice firm feel, but it won't fulfill its job. Leaks at the back of the pad can be difficult to find for someone not familiar with this. A pad that's too thick, will, on the other hand, hit the tone hole in the back (North), but leak in the front. These leaks are easier to see because the leaking part of the pad is right out where you can see it. Pads that leak in the front tend to have a mushy feel because of the tendency to "squeeze through" the leak and press on the pad until the front reaches the tone hole, thereby squishing the back. Gemeinhardt flutes seem especially prone to coming from the factory with pads that are too thick and leak in the front. I guess they figure that over time things will settle, and in fairness it probably is easier for a player to overcome a leak in front than a leak in back by simply pressing harder.
This front-to-back relationship is so crucial to the performance and feel of the pad that it's the first thing I address when leveling pads. I try not to worry too much about the side-to-side (East and West) relationship until later, unless the pad is tilted severely to one side. In most cases, the front-to-back relationship is adjusted by installing whole shims behind the pad. More/thicker shims if it's leaking in the back, fewer/thinner shims if it's leaking in the front. It sounds simple, and in practice it should be, but pads compress and shift and need to be ironed and it's just a pain in the ass to get everything to line up right. Only after assuring myself that the pad is hitting the front and back of the tone hole at exactly the same time with minimal finger pressure do I move on to other parts of the pad. I am borderline obsessive about this, checking both front and back repeatedly with my feeler gauge, approaching from different angles. Inevitably, if I haven't checked carefully enough, I'll find the problem later while doing regulation.
After that whole dance is over, I check the seal at East and West. If one is sealing and the other isn't, I'll try tilting the pad cup to try to get both to seal. While doing this, I'm still rechecking North and South occasionally to make sure things are still square. If tilting the pad cup doesn't solve things completely, then I'll move on to gluing partial shims to the back of the East or West side. Once I've got a good seal at all four compass points, I further break the pad down mentally into eighths, so that now I'm checking NE, SE, NW, and SW. Major leaks here demand more partial shims, and depending on the quality of the instrument and pads, even very small leaks can be shimmed. Once I've checked all eight sections of the pad, especially on a student level instrument, the pad should be sealing about as well as is possible. In my experience, trying to be any more precise on beginner flutes just adds time to the job without adding any improved performance. That's not to be taken as an excuse for sloppy work. Done right, a well-made student flute should play damn well, even if it's never going to feel or sound like a Powell or a Muramatsu.
That being said, if I am working on a Powell or Muramatsu (it could happen someday!), I further divide the pad into twelfths and recheck and shim as needed. I rarely work with pads that will respond to shims that are less than a twelfth the circumference of the pad (30 degrees), but with high-end pads you could certainly make a case for further dividing the pad.
The crux of my process, though, is that the front-to-back relationship must be spot on every time. Fail to address that, and it doesn't matter how much time I spend addressing every other section of the pad, the results will be disappointing.

Kangaroo Pads - Why Aren't they Bouncier?

I recently finished my first overhaul of a saxophone with kangaroo skin pads. The pads are popular because of the durability of the skin and a reputation for not getting sticky. Having worked with them pretty intensely for the past few days as I strove to perfectly seal every tone hole on the instrument, I can say that I like them, and I think they're made to a slightly higher standard than standard Ferree's sax pads. As for whether they're worth the astronomical price, I can't say. If they're still working hard in 10 years, most definitely. If they get the player a little more action because of how cool they look, absolutely. They're great, but maybe not three times as great as typical pads (however one would measure that). That being said, I was working with soprano sax pads, which are obviously pretty small and so have some weird nuances. It seems like the smaller a sax pad gets, the more likely it is to have a slightly rounded face instead of a flat one. Since leather can't be folded at a perfect 90 degree angle, there's always a curved transition area between the face of the pad and the side, where the leather folds up against the corner of the felt. On small pads, there's less space between the center of the pad and this curved transition area, and at a certain point the whole face of the pad is transition, so it more closely resembles a puffy little sphere (or perhaps even an oblate spheroid!) than a disc with a nice flat face. This is especially easy to see on 8, 9, and 10mm pads that are used for octave keys. Kangaroo skin, being evidently a little bit firmer and more rigid than the typical kid skin, exhibited this property a little more prominently than I would have liked, but as I said I was working with especially small pads, and I'd imagine it would cease to be a problem on larger pads. I can't say if the larger pads would exhibit the lumpiness sometimes found in less expensive pads, but I'll bet they don't, and that's a real selling point. 
The installation procedure was pretty much the same, except that it was easier to move the entire pad forward or backward in the cup because of their rigidity. I really liked that while I was doing the initial leveling. Later, though, I was still able to heat the cup and push up narrow sections of the pad to correct small leaks. I just had to be a little more careful with my heat control to avoid shifting the whole pad. I floated them on MusicMedic pink shellac, which they sell as amber shellac, but it's definitely pink. I don't know what makes it different from regular shellac, but it has a lower melting point, stays soft for longer, and smells positively delightful. It's my favorite shellac anymore.
I don't know when I'll next have a chance to work with kangaroo pads - we do a lot of student level instruments at the shop - but this was a good project to start with.

Lesson Learned - 7/26/13

If you're going to check the seal on a flute headcork, it's best to do it by drawing a vacuum on the embouchure hole and plugging the end of the head with your hand, instead of vice versa. And if you decide to ignore that completely rational and logical approach and draw a vacuum on the end of the head joint, make sure the crown is in place. That way if the cork comes loose under the vacuum, it won't shoot down the head joint straight at your stupid mouth at a speed slightly above mach 7 and nearly knock your front teeth out.

Horn Drying Experiment

We see a lot of (French) horns come in with stuck rotors that are otherwise pretty clean. Despair not, horn players, that's the last mention you'll see here of that word referring to things from the upper half of the Iberian peninsula. I have to provide terms the layman can understand, you know. Incidentally, if you are a layman reading this, you've come to the wrong place. Tumblr is a few pages over.

Often these are instruments that get regularly used, but one day one or several of the rotors just starts sticking. Sometimes it's because there's buildup on the rotor body and the casing, which just happens naturally over time. It can also happen if the rotor isn't getting oiled regularly. Other brass players seem to have no problem with regularly lubricating the moving parts of their instruments, but a lot of the horn players I see seem to think that the instrument gets oiled when it's serviced and then doesn't require further oiling. Perhaps because the rotor is sealed up and so hard to get to, they figure the oil stays in the casing. In fact, the rotors need pretty regular oiling. Even though the spindle oil is pretty thick and needs less frequent replenishment, the rotor body is the part that's being constantly subjected to water and whatever organic matter is coming from the player's mouth through the leadpipe and into the rotor block. Because of that, the rotor body can benefit significantly from a protective layer of valve oil. We often think of valve oil just being for lubrication of valves, but it has a few other functions, one of which is acting as a protective film on the face of the valve that repels water and other materials. While valve oil doesn't act as a lubricant in rotors (all the bearing surfaces requiring lubrication are on the spindles and should have spindle oil), a few drops down the slide tubes about once a week will help keep the rotors clean.

Valve oil provides another benefit as I mentioned, which is repelling water. I believe that water in the casings is the other big cause of sticky rotors. Often when I remove a sticky rotor to clean it I find that the rotor itself is pretty clean, but a huge amount of (gross) water will come pouring out of the casing and be beaded up all over the face of the valve. Water is like anti-lubricant. It has relatively strong cohesion and adhesion properties, and droplets have pretty thick surfaces. When water gets between the rotor body and the casing wall, it wants to stick to all the surfaces and itself, creating a vapor lock that stops the valve from being able to move alongside the casing. A lot of times, just getting the water out of the casings and slathering the rotor bodies with valve oil is enough to get things working, but that's beyond the capabilities of a lot of players who aren't comfortable with removing their rotors and reassembling them.

For those players, though, there may be another way. A horn player who regularly patronizes our shop is an engineer and was on board with my idea about vapor lock, so he figured that if he could remove the water from his horn he could remedy the sticking rotors. His first idea was to use a shop vac set to "blow" to send air down the bell and through the rotor block, back out through the leadpipe. After agreeing that that could send some shop vac contents and other dust into the instrument, he instead tried sucking the water out through the bell. By placing the end of the shop vac hose into the bell to create a tight seal, he was able to drain a good bit of water from the rotor block, and saw an instant improvement in the performance of his rotors. A week later, things were still working great.

There's still no substitute for regularly oiling your rotors. But water buildup is a problem that can creep up on any instrument, and I think the shop vac method of evacuating water can be a good way to maintain your instrument between professional cleanings, which should be every 1-3 years, or every time you feel like sending your repair tech some money, which is probably pretty frequently.

Lesson Learned - 6/21/13

As my last post was filled with optimism about the technique of burnishing out scratches, it's only natural that this post is filled with soul-crushing reality. I decided to try the technique on another trumpet the other day, this time on a small scratch under a dent at the very back of the stem. The instrument was in for a cleaning, no dent removal was requested, but I thought "Hell, I'll take the dent out at no charge, then it will give me a chance to practice. If it's not perfect, no big deal, because it will still be better than when I started, and they're not expecting the dent to come out." 

Wrong.

I learned something important about burnishing - ALWAYS make sure the area you are burnishing is completely clean, not only on the outside surface, but on the inside, too. Any crud on the inside of the instrument will get stuck between the inner surface and the surface of the mandrel you're burnishing on. That results in tiny little dents coming out from the inside of the instrument that only get worse the more you burnish. I had just cleaned this instrument, so I though I was safe, but failed to look down the bell to make sure everything was clean, and somehow a bunch of corrosion had remained in the back of the stem, right in the area I was burnishing. So not only did I do an incomplete job cleaning the instrument (after all my bluster about ultrasonic cleaning in the brochure), but I made the finish worse trying to fix something that wasn't supposed to be addressed. Further, I ran out of time to make it right on Friday, so I'll be trying to fit it in tomorrow.

The myriad lessons of this day merit a list of their own.

1) Check down the bell after cleaning to make sure you got everything out
2) If you didn't, move on to more serious cleaning practices, in this case a dip in Mineral Shock would be next.
3) If a mandrel is catching in the bell, it's because the bell is dirty on the inside!
4) Don't burnish on a dirty piece of tubing!
5) Don't do work the customer doesn't want, even if you think it will "add value."
6) Especially if that work is burnishing on a dirty piece of tubing! In case you forgot, it's not OK to do that!
7) Respect the techniques that have been handed down to you. For instance, burnishing is great, but only if you're willing to commit the time to do it right and not rush.

Number seven is the most important. Respect what others have taught you and respect your craft. Don't get too big for your britches or assume you're becoming an expert just because something goes well once or twice. It took my predecessors a lot of time and a lot of screw-ups to learn the things they've shared with me. It will take me a long time, too. Today was one of those screw-ups I'll carry with me, as I hope to carry all of my mistakes and preserve them in my memory and in this blog. Making mistakes is part of the process of learning and getting better, so I'm trying not to feel terrible about this one. I think I'll be able to make it right, and the experience will become another building block I draw upon as I continue to advance my skills. That, however, doesn't change the fact that with a little more focus and attention to detail I could have avoided it completely.

Lesson Learned - 6/20/13

Yesterday I used La Tromba slide/cork grease for the first time. It's great stuff! Thick without being greasy, it required only a little bit to lubricate a slide, stuck well to the inner tubes, and was easy to clean up. 

I also did a little personal refresher on burnishing scratches in silver, after reading a post on facebook advocating the practice as a finishing step in repairing brass instruments. I spent about 20 minutes buffing my hand burnisher to get it smooth, then about 10 minutes burnishing a scratch in a trumpet bell, with very nice results. The scratch (which was small to being with) completely disappeared, and after buffing the area to clean up my fingerprints, it looked great. I need a lot more practice at burnishing to get good at it, but I'm glad to have that technique back in my arsenal. It's amazing how I forget things I learned not that long ago when the skills go unused. Writing about these experiences helps keep them in the forefront of my mind, though.

Slingerland Tympani Clutch Replacement - 6/7/13

These are pictures from an old Slingerland tympani that came into the shop with the entire clutch assembly missing. The pedal was there, and the clutch shaft was there, but nothing else. Without the clutch, the drum couldn't be tuned, and a tympani that can't be tuned is pretty much just a big expensive tom.

I was able to track down a clutch assembly from Falls Percussion in New Jersey, and with a few additions on my part was able to install it and get the drum back in working order.

In the center left of this photo, you can see the clutch box bolted onto the frame of the pedal. Going through the clutch box is the clutch shaft on which the box slides. Inside the box are two cylindrical pieces of steel with a ring of ball bearings between them. A spring at the top of the box pushes down on the upper cylinder, which causes the bearings to press against the lower cylinder and jam up the shaft in the box. This is what allows the clutch to hold its position and keep the drum at pitch. When the pedal is depressed, a connecting rod (visible in the next picture), pulls against a y-shaped release lever (partially obscured by the frame near the center of the picture. It's held in place with the two screws next to the big bolt). This causes the release lever to push up on the lower cylinder in the clutch, pushing the bearings up (which also raises the upper cylinder and compresses the spring), and releasing the pressure on the rod. Then the clutch box can freely move up and down on the rod until the desired pitch is reached, at which point you release the pedal and the clutch locks again.

This is the connecting rod, running from the bottom of the pedal to the clutch release lever. It has a spring on it, but only to take up slack.

I had to make the connecting rod, which was basically just a 10-32 machine screw, tapered a little bit at the head and sheathed in that long spring. I also needed to modify the bolts that hold the box onto the frame. They thread into the frame with 3/16-24 threads, but at the end of each bolt there has to be a much narrower, unthreaded section that fits into a socket on the clutch box. That modification mostly involved filing material away until the bolt fit that socket.

The mechanism is a bit antiquated, but it's also beautifully simple. There are no counter springs - when the pedal is released, the tension of the drum head pulls the pedal up. When the pedal is pressed down, it's pulling directly on the head tension rods to raise the pitch of the head. As the head gets older and loses some of its springiness things becomes a little more sluggish, but as long as it's cared for it seems like a very effective tuning mechanism. Finding parts for it, unfortunately, is a bitch, but I'll always check with Falls Percussion in the future.

Lesson Learned - 6/5/13

Sometimes flute knock pins just aren't worth removing.

Selmer flutes, especially model FL300, and some Bundy flutes have the devastating combination of:
1. Low-grade key oil that dries up on the hinge rods, leaving behind a thick, sticky residue that makes the keys sluggish or sometimes causes them to freeze all together
2. Knock pins that are driven in with so much force I can only assume they load thousands of them into a cannon, then fire that cannon at a flute in the hope that one of the pins will embed itself into the appropriate key. These pins then have all of their excess ground off, so that it's impossible to grab them and very difficult to strike them accurately with a knock pin remover. Not that striking them accurately matters much, because they still won't come out due to the whole cannon-pressure thing.

I got myself into a lot of trouble today trying to remove the knock pin on a lower stack on one of these flutes. As of the end of work today, I've managed to remove it, but only after completely ruining the plate it was driven through (the one between the E and D keys) and severely bending the hinge rod by striking it repeatedly and forcefully with a knock pin driver. I decided to take that plate off so I could remove the lower stack keys and clean and reoil the hinge rod, because the keys were pretty sticky. But having gotten myself into this quagmire, I know that it would have been easier to just reoil the rod and carefully work the keys back and forth until they were free. This wouldn't have been a permanent solution, but now I've given myself a great deal more work to do - work that I can't charge for because I've already given an estimate, plus the work is for a friend. It would have been cheaper to oil the rod with the understanding that they keys would probably gum up again, and just agree to address any future stickiness with periodic oilings for free for the life of the instrument.

I know for the future to just not bother if a pin is giving me that much trouble. Now all I have to do is remember that in the heat of the moment the next I'm getting ready to hammer the living piss out of a flute key.

Lesson Learned - 6/4/13

I'm starting to get a better understanding of how pads age and how the behave as they get older. A skin pad - like a clarinet pad - that seals firmly around the entire diameter of a tone hole would be expected to seal. But if it's an old pad, it can leak even though there are no obvious leaks around the perimeter. In the past I've discovered this to be the case with pads that have tiny holes in the skin or cracks in the skin. Sometimes on flute pads it's a small cut that I caused with a wayward screwdriver while removing a pad washer. Other times there a sort of bump in the pad where it looks like a small hair was somehow glued into the fiber of the skin. This causes the pad not to lay flat against the tone hole edge. I don't think it's actually a hair, but I don't know what it is.

It also seems that as the skin ages it could lose some of its airtight properties through other means. What these are I can't say, as I must admit that I don't know very much about the materials used in pad skins, but it's conceivable that these materials lose their desirable airtight properties as they age and dry out. I know pad skin is usually made from the organ linings of cows, so presumably the skin ages and decays like any other organic matter. All I can say with certainty right now is that it's frustrating to replace pads on an instrument, then find a leak that's coming from an older pad that showed no outward signs of fatigue.

I also learned that you measure chuck keys by the capacity of the chuck and the size of the pilot holes on the outside of it. So a chuck with a 1/4" capacity and 5/32" diameter pilot hole takes a 1/4-5/32 chuck key.

Lesson Learned - 5/28/13

When buffing a trombone handslide, I'm always a little nervous that the buffing wheel will catch one of the tubes and bend it. In my mind it's a catastrophic bend or kink, but in reality, the forces generated by heavy buffing could conceivably bend a long tube just a little bit. The solution? Buff the tube with a steel handslide mandrel inside it! The mandrel won't bend, and therefore neither will the tube. My coworker M gave me that little trick, and it was welcome advice.

Buffet Matched Clarinets, After - 5/23/13

It's been a few weeks, but I promised myself I'd post some images of those Buffet clarinets after completion, and I'm not one to let myself down. This project was actually finished a few weeks ago.

 Here they are side-by-side in the neat double case. All the keys buffed up quite nicely. I overhauled the Bb (on top) and my coworker M overhauled the A.

A view of the upper stack keys to compare to the before pictures.

The instruments came with this unique barrel, which was the only one in the case. For a while we suspected that it was expandable/adjustable, but could not get it to come apart. Other techs suggested it may have just been cut apart by someone and put back together to change the intonation. However after some persuasion I found that it was, in fact, adjustable, and could be extended by unscrewing the two pieces from each other. Once it was unstuck, I took it apart to clean all the parts of the adjustment mechanism, and after putting it back together it runs smoothly. It appears to be a one-of-a-kind or very rare modification, done by some technician in the past who had a very good machining skills. The parts were very well made and closely fitted. Our assumption is that it was made so one barrel could be used on both the Bb and A clarinets with just a few twists to adjust it, as Bb and A clarinets use barrels of slightly different lengths.

Just a cool mouthpiece cap that was in the case. It's made of wood!

Matched Set of Old Buffet Clarinets - 4/26/13

One of our big projects at work this week was a matched set of Buffet clarinets - one Bb, one A - that came in a neat old double case. They are very nice solid body instruments with all sorts of unique key mechanisms. Both were in for overhauls - they got disassembled and cleaned, the bores were oiled, all the keys and posts were buffed, all pads and corks were replaced, and parts were repaired/straightened/sealed as needed. I got to work on the Bb while my associate, M, did the A. It was an enlightening experience because, while we're each pretty well in tune with how the other works, we got to see the parallels in our work in real-time. And since we wanted the work to be identical between the two instruments, that meant we each had to scrutinize the other's work and ask questions about our repective techniques. For instance, I always use cork on a particular articulation on clarinets, but Mike asked that I use teflon sheet to match his work, which worked much better. I dry-fit all the pads on my clarinet before gluing them, which allowed me to advise him on what pads to use. The instruments cleaned up very nicely and will look great when they're finished. I'll be sure to post follow up images next week, but for now I wanted to make sure I preserved some images of them "before."

Here are the two side-by-side. Bb on top. Notice that the G# keys are in line with the other mainline keys instead of being on the side, both have Low Bb/Eb keys, left hand Ab/Eb levers, and an open-hole pad for the middle finger of the left hand.

The trademarks are stamped with W.H Cundy on the Bb bell and H. Bettoney on the A bell. Cundy and Bettoney in Boston were apparently one of the early Buffet importers in the US.

  A close-up view of the low end keys, with the Eb/Bb key at the far left side of the picture. Sorry about the dental floss. I don't know why I didn't cut that off before taking pictures. Lord knows why it was there.

The right hand keys have an extra trill key between the top and middle rings, and a screw on the Bb/F pad cup that closes the C#/G# key when trilling.

The key for the middle finger of the left hand is usually just a ring over a chimney. Similar rings are visible on the right and left of this picture. But these instrument have a pad there with an open hole in the middle, which I'm told is for playing a forked Eb. The pad and key cup are identical to those found on open-hole flutes, and the key takes a flute pad. This is the only pad on the instrument that's not glued in. Instead it's held in place with a grommet and leveled with paper shims that are stacked inside the key cup.

A shot of the tone hole under that pad. The hole that air vents out of is quite small; about the same size as the opening in the pad. But the pad seats, or seals, against the lip surrounding that hole. I guess the hole is smaller to allow proper intonation or tone quality, as the size of a tone hole vastly affects those two things.

Reaching the top of the instrument, we have a register key that wraps around to the top of the bore. Most register keys sit on the bottom of the bore where they're prone to collect water and dirt. I love these wrap-around keys. They're big and ugly and out-of-place and I love them.

Lesson Learned - 4/23/13

Clicking Forked Bb on saxophone? Oil or grease the Bb key pivot screws if it has them, as well as the regulation screws on the F# key. I've found that every time, that takes care of the clicking. That's after I've checked to make sure all the pivot screws are tight, that none of the rollers are getting some sort of sympathetic vibrations (by oiling them, too), and that the regulation screws aren't wobbling in their holes. If they are, I can usually get them to tighten up by squishing the threads on them a little bit with a pair of pliers. But after checking all those things, if there's still clicking, oiling the pivot screws and regulation screws always takes care of the problem.

Lesson Learned - 4/18/13

I have a recurring problem with flutes that I especially notice when I'm overhauling them. I think I'm pretty careful about leveling tone holes, then making sure pads are perfectly level to the tone holes when I install them. But inevitably I'll level pads, move on to something else, and then go back to double check them and find that they are leaking in the back. By "back," I mean the part of the pad closest to the hinge. I haven't yet figured out why this is, but my suspicion is this: When I install and level the pads, I'm usually doing it with just the spring for that particular key set in its cradle. On the lower stack, for instance, if I'm working on the F pad, I usually won't have the springs set for F#, E, or D. But when I get everything put together and re-check the pad later I'll find that it's open in the back. In fact, I'll usually find that all the lower stack pads are leaking in the back. I suspect this is because the forces exerted on the lower stack by hooking all four springs causes the hinge rod to either bend or rise up from the body, thereby changing the way the pads interface with their tone holes. I tried to experiment with this a little bit today, but didn't see any compelling evidence to support my hypothesis. I'll be playing around with that idea more, though, and hopefully I'll come up with more concrete explanation.

Lesson Learned - 4/17/13

It seems that there is no safe setting to run our ultrasonic cleaner on old or antique instruments. The other day I tried an experiment with different intensities on a trumpet main tuning slide that was rotted, to see at what intensity it would develop holes in the rotted areas. This has been a frequent problem for us in the past, especially on horn leadpipes, which seem prone to collecting gunk and then having it sit there for a long time while the metal of the leadpipe deteriorates. In my little experiment, the mouthpiece survived a 3-minute soak in the chemical bath with no ultrasonic agitation, then survived 3 minutes with the ultrasonic set at 40% intensity. After 3 minutes at 50% intensity, though, pinholes started developing. 
So then my coworker M tried putting an old Conn 22B trumpet in and running it at 40% intensity, figuring that would be enough to clean the instrument without damaging the metal. Of course, this was only based on my pretty poorly executed experiment, so we shouldn't have been surprised when the main tuning crook developed cracks. There was no rot on the instrument. But because it's about 80 years old, it's possible the metal may have just developed some fractures over time.
I've read about "season cracking," which is a problem specific to brass where residual stresses in the metal that are created during the forming process cause cracks when the brass is exposed to temperature changes and, more importantly, ammonia. The problem was initially discovered in British ammunition cartridges that were stored in stables near copious amounts of horse urine. Well, they weren't intentionally stored near horse urine. They were stored near horses, which happen to turn water into that offending substance. I don't imagine this trumpet spent a lot of time around horses, but perhaps there was some other source of ammonia that could have caused the problem, or maybe the temperature changes of some 80-odd years were enough to cause to the failure of this particular instrument without any source of ammonia. Whatever the case, the crook of a main tuning slide would be especially susceptible to season cracking because of the huge amount of stress that is exerted on it during manufacture. It's interesting to note that simply annealing the part after forming will remove these stresses and therefore all but eliminate the possibility of season cracking.
Getting back to the point, though; The lesson is that we haven't yet found a perfectly safe method for cleaning fragile instruments. I don't think anyone has found a perfectly safe method, and that's why there are so many techniques out there. At least for now, I think we'd do well not to run old or fragile instruments through the ultrasonic at all, except as a last option when other methods don't get them clean. Right now it's our first and last resort because it's so convenient and consistently performs well, but that's an approach that needs to be revised when it comes to these types of instruments.

Disassembling a Metal Clarinet Barrel (Lesson Learned 3/5/13)

With yesterday's lesson being so internal, I knew that today I'd want to write about something very straightforward. So I chose a lesson I learned yesterday, which is:

How to Disassemble a Selmer Metal Clarinet Barrel

This post, like all of them, is still for my own reference, because I've already forgotten how to do this once. But as far as I can tell these instructions aren't available anywhere else online, so maybe they'll be useful to someone else who will actually stumble upon this blog. Here goes:

This is the kind of barrel I'm talking about. It's on a Selmer Paris metal clarinet and seems typical of the design for Selmer's metal clarinets. Of course, Selmer doesn't make these instruments anymore. I don't know that any major manufacturers still do, but they had a heyday in the first half of the 20th century. Once plastic instruments became cheap and easy to make they largely disappeared from production, but some people still like them or collect them. In my opinion, the sound is a little too distinct to be useful in ensembles, but I guess some find them pleasant.

The unique thing about these barrels is that they're adjustable. Instead of pulling the barrel away from the upper joint to adjust pitch (or pushing it in), you turn an adjusting lug that lengthens or shortens the barrel itself. The barrel consists of four parts, as shown below. I don't know if these are their real names, but they make sense to me.

1. Lower barrel, which attaches to the clarinet. The collar goes at the top of it, and the adjusting lug turns freely around it. The upper barrel goes inside it.

2. Adjusting lug, which turns to either lengthen or shorten the barrel.

3. Collar, which threads onto the lower barrel and holds the adjusting lug in place. Usually there is a set screw in the collar holding it onto the lower barrel. That screw was missing on this instrument, but don't worry, I made a replacement.

4. Upper barrel, which attaches to the mouthpiece. The threaded section (not visible in this photo) engages the threads on the inside of the adjusting lug, making it move up and down when the lug is turned. It goes inside the lower barrel.

Unfortunately, since these instruments haven't been made in a long time and have fallen out of use, the ones we see come through the shop are usually in very bad shape, having been found in attics, basements, or some other place where they've been neglected and ignored for a very long time. As a result, the first problem we encounter with barrels is that the adjusting lugs are usually stuck and the whole barrel is fused together with gunk, so the first thing to do is to get that moving. A combination of penetrating oil and heat can help break down some of the buildup, and gently tapping directly on the lug with a rawhide mallet can shake things loose (this is the same thing we do on bottom valve caps on brass instruments). Failing that, a pair of soft-jawed pliers can be used, or if you're feeling brave, a pair of regular pliers with a thick piece of leather. Don't blame me when they slip and scratch up the finish, though. I find it's best to put the mouthpiece end of the barrel on an expander that's secured in a vise to provide some anchoring. 

The lug twists counterclockwise (left) to lengthen, and clockwise (right) to shorten the barrel. When loosening it, be sure you are twisting in the right direction. Often they'll be choked up all the way (as seen in the first photo) so that the only direction to go is counterclockwise (left). But if it's partially extended, as visible below, the best thing is to twist clockwise (right), so that you're making the barrel shorter. You'll need to reverse that later to disassemble everything, but the goal here is just to get things moving in any direction, and there is a good reason for not overextending the barrel at this point, which has to do with the collar and will become obvious later.

Once you have the lug moving back and forth, the next step is to remove the collar. The collar only moves one direction, clockwise (right) to loosen. You'll need to first remove the set screw, if present. Then make sure the barrel is partially extended, as shown above, so that you have somewhere for the collar to go as you loosen it. Ideally, once the set screw is out, you should just be able to twist the collar off. In practice, though, it will probably be gunked up, so you could place a sharpened wooden dowel in the set screw hole and tap on that to get it started. Just be careful not to dent it, because it will be a bitch to get back on later if it's dented or out-of-round. 

Here's the collar partially removed. Notice how fine the threads are. They are very prone to getting dirty.

As you unscrew the collar, the adjusting lug may move. Just keep an eye on it, you may want to adjust it to keep things from getting to tight as you work.

Here's the collar fully removed. Now it's free to just flop around up there.

Next you remove the lower barrel from the upper barrel by simply turning the lug counterclockwise (left) until the threads disengage. When the collar is in place, it prevents you from being able to do this and stops the lug before it reaches the end of the threads. That's why it was important not to overextend the barrel earlier - it's only designed to go so far with the collar in place. Here's a picture of the lower barrel partially removed. The large threads in the center are what engage the adjusting lug and allow the upper barrel to move up and down.

Once the upper and lower barrels are separated, you'll have this:

And this:

Separating the lower barrel from the adjust lug is easy - it should just slide off, though you may need to unscrew it as the lug slides over the fine threads at the top of the lower barrel.

Now you need to remove the collar from the upper barrel if you want to clean it really well. The collar has to be aligned just right in order to slip off. In this picture you can see at the top of the collar there is a relief in the threads (between 11 o'clock and 1 o'clock). That relief must be lined up with the large threads on the upper barrel to slip over them as you remove the collar. The collar does not unscrew from the upper barrel, it just slips off.

Here they are separated. The relief in the collar is again visible in the same spot, closest to the top of the photo.

Here's another shot of the collar, showing the hole for the set screw. The collar is upside-down in this photo.

That's it. Once you have everything apart, you can clean it thoroughly, and reverse the process to put it back together. Make sure to heavily grease all the threads as you reassemble. I also like to put grease on the face of the upper barrel before reinserting into the lower barrel, just to help things slide and create an airtight seal.

Lesson Learned - 3/4/13

In what may also be a surprise life lesson, I had something demonstrated to me that is probably good business practice anyway. When dealing with a customer who challenges your work, the best thing is to talk to them directly and find out their concern. Then, if the problem is legitimate, your first option is to address it and deal with a little bit of egg on your face. The worst thing to do would be to NOT listen to them, or use a delegate to tell them that there is nothing wrong and it's all in their head. That is something I have unfortunately been guilty of many times because I find it's easier to stay secluded back in the shop and leave a salesperson to deal with the customer's impending wrath, even though I know fully well that that's not the right thing to do. In fact it's exactly the wrong thing because it comes with this additional snag - that sometimes the customer will in fact be right, that you are overlooking a problem, and then you have to backpedal when that problem is made clear and you finally realize that you were in the wrong for dismissing them.

But I think that in most cases the reason I'm afraid to face the customer directly is that I'm afraid I'm not perceiving a problem because my skills are insufficient to diagnose and correct it. It's difficult to admit when a customer catches a problem that you missed, especially because they're relying on you for expertise. Admittedly, that has almost never happened, which may be a credit to me or may just be luck. However another fear is that in this scenario I might be right - that there is no problem, and that there will be no way to convince them of that. In that scenario, it's not easy to "agree to disagree" because they have usually already paid for my services and feel that they didn't get their money's worth. But if the problem truly is in their head and I know that their instrument is working properly, what can I do? I can make some minor adjustment that usually has nothing to do with the problem they're experiencing, I can try to allay their fears and ask them to give it a few days, or I can force the issue, stand my ground, and risk an impasse. In the last case, though, if they won't back down either, the resolution sometimes comes down to giving them a refund for good work just to stop the impasse from becoming any bigger. I think I find that repugnant because I have such a problem swallowing my pride and conceding, especially when I feel I'm in the right (but I also have difficulty with it when I know I'm in the wrong).

I guess another option would be to take the instrument back and pretend to do some work to it, but I find I'm a terrible liar.

Yesterday, though, a salesperson came back into the shop with a saxophone we'd just repaired, explained the issue the student was having (he could get High G to sound in the right octave) and asked if we could fix it. I looked at the instrument and legitimately found no problem with the octave mechanism, then played it and found everything to be just peachy. At that point I had a choice: either send the salesperson back out with the assertion that there was nothing wrong, or go out myself and try to learn a little bit more about the problem. In a rare feat, I decided to do the right thing and went out to talk to the customer. I asked the student about the problems he was having, asked the mom what she had been told by the teacher, and came to realize that the teacher had given the student some faulty information about what keys should be opening when he plays High G. Apparently the teacher had heard the problem with that note, saw that the neck octave wasn't opening - which it shouldn't, anyway - and believed the two were connected. I explained a little bit about the function of the octave mechanism, assured the student that everything was working properly, then asked him to demonstrate how he holds and plays the instrument. Then I asked him to play and, sure enough, his High G was cracking down an octave. But by reaching back into my teaching knowledge (thanks  otherwise useless music education degree!), I was able to lead him through a few simple exercises in which he was indeed able to consistently play that note correctly. In that moment his mom - who had every right to be suspicious of our work - asked if it was possible he just needed a little more practice, which was the point I was trying to gently get to all along. The student, too, seemed a little more comfortable with the function of the instrument and what he needed to do in order to make it do his will. With all of us on the same page, they packed up and left satisfied.

Would it have been easier to remain in the shop and hope the issue would blow over? Of course. And it's likely the student would have eventually realized that if he changed things like his air speed and embouchure he could get that High G to consistently speak. But by going out there, risking the possibility of an impasse, and talking directly to the customers, I was reminded that most people are not stubborn and suspicious, and often just want a little bit more information when they question my work. It was hardly a heroic or even noteworthy decision. In fact, I was barely doing what should be expected of me anyway as an employee and human being. But it helped me remember something important that I need to keep in mind as I continue my career in a service-based industry.

Or it may also be true that most people will accept the word of someone they view as an expert even when it disagrees with their initial impression. I always do that. And when you look as good in an apron as I do, people can't help but think of you as a sage who's word is infallible.