This fairly new tenor sax took a bad fall and landed on the neck and the bell rim. Both ended up badly dented, but this neck clearly took the brunt of the impact.
Usually when we see neck damage, it's because the neck has been bent and is out of round. This was a unique project, because most of the neck was still in fine shape and there weren't huge high spots to deal with. On bent necks, the high ridges running down the sides are a big challenge for me. The trade-off of not having to deal with that, though, was that the isolated damage was pretty severe. Repairing it involved first removing the saddle plate, buffing the tinning and lacquer from the damaged area, and annealing the dent. The high heat of annealing burned a lot of the remaining lacquer, too, despite my well-intentioned but futile efforts to protect it with Cold Shield past. Cold Shield is great for protecting nearby solder joints that you don't want to overheat, but in this application it sucked up too much heat, which prevented the dented area from reaching the temperature needed to anneal the brass. So I had to clean it all off and proceed with the annealing, knowing that a lot of heat would get transferred to the lacquered areas and toast what lacquer was there.
Once annealed the brass was soft enough to move and begin reshaping. About a half hour of careful work brought it to this point:
The large area of exposed brass is from buffing away all the lacquer that was burned during annealing. After some more shaping with dent balls and tapping with a soft hammer, the area was smooth enough to reinstall the saddle plate, then clean, buff, and lacquer. I'd say this is some of the best dent work I've done, especially on a sax neck, but I need to get better at matching lacquer tint - not having a spray gun is a hindrance. I try to tint the brass before spraying it with clear lacquer, but I need to work on that process more. It's certainly a step in the right direction, though, with regard to improving the finesse of my dent work.
