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.