Piccolo Trumpet First Slide Trigger.

One of our pro clients wanted a valve slide throw trigger installed on his schilke pic. I manufactured up one for him.
One of the beauties of the piece is that it only has two solder joints and thus can be removed with minimal damage to the finish.
One of the main challenges of this project was aligning the slides. From the factory, the span was set about 0.010'' off between the inner and outer slides. This was to make sure the slide didn't fall out. In order to fix this I had to unsolder the outer slides and removed about 0.007'' from the I.D. at the solder points. This allowed the slide to move freely.
The rest of the project was a full days time of filing, drilling, cutting ,bending , and soldering.

This is the unmodified horn.

 Here is the completed trigger. It has a grenadilla touch piece.

 The Linkage is steel drill rod which has been bent to accommodate the geometry of the trigger.

 Everything was made by hand with the exception of the set screw for the touch piece and the ball joints.

Valve Trombone Bb to C Convertion

On occation, we have customers who purchase old valve trombones and want them converted from Bb to C. They use them for a nice midrange horn that doesn't need concert pitch music transposed.

This is one I cut down.

It had red rot throughout the upper and lower leadpipes, some superglued solder points, and a broken brace. Other than that, it was in decent shape.

I started by disassembling and cleaning it. 

In order to shorten the horn, I had to almost completely disassemble it. There were only a few solder points that did not need to come apart.

I replaced the upper and lower leadpipes with some similar I.D. nickel silver tubing we had.

 The O.D was slightly larger so I had to machine some ferrules to accommodate.

In order to change the pitch from Bb to C about 20% of the tubing has to be removed. So every tube was measured and cut to an appropriate length.

Before I soldered everything together, I slapped it together with masking tape and playtested it to make sure the tuning was right.

After the pitch was confirmed I soldered her all up. It played pretty much on pitch. Just as well as any other valve trombone.

Super Aristocrate Buescher Cornet

Here is a cornet that I did a complete overhaul on. The Leadpipe was replaced by me and main tuning slide was replaced at the refinishing shop we send our plating and lacquer work to. I was disappointed that they did not use nickel silver for the ferrules and that they didn't transfer the brace. However the people up front needed the horn out the door and the client did not care.

Neck Cork Replacement using Lathe

Civil War era tenor horn stop arms

There are several civil war band reenactors in the area. They all play period correct horns. Old horns wear out. This particular beast had worn out stems on it's rotors. The original stop arms had steel pins instead of a brass rails as are found on modern rotors. The steel pins severely wore the alignment groves in the rotor stems. I considered replacing the stems on the rotors, However, I didn't want to cut into a 150 year old valve. So instead I decided to make up new stop arms.

 I started with some stock turned down to the diameter of the old stop arms, 0.535''.

Next I made of the arm of the stop arm. I used an old sax key for stock material. Once I had the blanks shaped to sizes, I set them up in a tool holder on the lathe.

Using a #52 drill, I lined up the stock brass and drilled a hole. I then tapped it to a 2-56 thread.

In order to make a clean, solid, silver solder joint, I filled a bit of a dish into the stock.

Next step was to silver solder the arm onto the 0.535'' stock.

After cleaning off the flux and heat varnish, I chucked up the stop arm in the lathe and turned the part to length.  I then drilled the holes. A #18 and a #4 bit were used.

From here, I lined up the new rail slot with the old stop arm's pin. I cut the slot with a jeweler's saw and a needle file.

Now I filed a peice of square stock into a new rail. Each one of them was fit perfectly to it's respective valve's groove.

Next step was to silver solder the rail onto the arm.

Last step was to file down the extra brass and buff it up. There also was little bit of cleanup needed on the inside of the arm, too.

I made up two more. Here are the old arms (above) and the new (below.)

The last thing to do was assemble and port the valves. This was done with a usb scope. These old valves have no witness marks.

Here is the horn all assembled and ready for the customer.