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!