S2 week 3

Just the mess on my workbench. A trombone and two trumpets.

My project trombone is a Holton.

Oh, dents. Those came to be when the slide wasn't secured in the case, so it banged against the bell.

Waterkey. Look at how the spring is wrapped around the posts, there is no pin in there.

The slide for the project trombone, I guess we'll learn about those soon.

The bumper on my trombone, it's knocked in. I'm sure it will be a fun fix.

The crook on my trombone, riddled with dents and ridges.

My crook after sending some dentballs through. Looks way better now, but there is room for improvement.

My gooseneck, and it's not attached to the brace, the solder joint has broken and the brace is crooked.

How did this even break?

Oh, and the bell has a fold, but that's an easy fix.

Lathe project! This is a trombone inner slide plug. We use it to support the end of the tube so that the tube doesn't go out of round. It's also used to plut into the end, for sighting, or the trombone slide will look like an endless road to nowhere.

Yay, my plug again. It doesn't look like much but we had to make it really precise. The smaller end is 499 thousands, the bigger one 524 thousands. We could only be 1 thousand smaller, so this took a lot of measuring and being mindful on the lathe.

S2 week 2

Thread repair. This is going to be fun, mostly because you can see the results so clearly.

That is not round at all!

Tapping at a dentball to make the threads round again, but very carefully so it's not flared out.

Look at the black areas around the dentball, and where the ball is contacting the surrounding threads, that tells me where it's out of round.

Casing repair. Greg may have used his steel hammer on that casing to make a pretty dent for me, the piston can't even go in all the way because the dent is so big!

 The trumpet I had to fix the casing dent in.

Can you see that ginormous dent? It's right in the middle of the picture. 

That's how small the dent looks from a bit of a distance, my left ring finger is pointing at it.

Can you see the dent inside of the casing now? Look inside and there is a small spot, that looks like a penny. This tiny little thing will stop the piston from going all the way down.

After putting it on a mandrel and tapping it looks better. I ended up getting it out completely and worked on alignment of the whole trumpet to get the second piston to feel nice too.

 

Those are going to be thread cap pliers. Basically it's a bottom cap of a yamaha trumpet (those pliers will only be used for fixing threads on bottom caps on yamaha trumpets) that I'm going to silver solder to pliers. After that I'll cut through the cap so each half will be attached to one "leg" of the pliers. Then I just need to put the cap around bad threads, squeeze with my pliers and twist.

Going to solder my pliers to the bottom cap. This didn't go well because the cap still had plating on it (oops), so I will have to do that at a later time. It wasn't a class project and isn't graded so this tool is not a priority.

S2 week 1

Time to do a review. Taking out a bow dent, a buckle and some smaller dents.

Alright, a customer project! This one is exciting. The owner wants to add a waterkey to the third slide and a finger hook (saddle) to the first slide. The trumpet also has mysterious blowouts on the throat (this is what happens if you try to take out dents with a drumstick) and the bell flare needs to be finished off (it obviously had a buckle, but someone tried to take most of it out).

The first thing I noticed when I got the trumpet. A gig bag. This does not protect the trumpet very well, even if the padding is nice. Trumpets should be kept in hard cases with a nice "nest" for them to rest in.

That was a throat dent that is almost out, better finish that up nicer.

Alright, a bell bow dent. I did a similar dent in my practice bell just few days ago, so this will be easy to get out.

This is a wroth tool, it's kind of hard to see in this picture because of the Canadian included, but look at the tool that is stuck in the vice. It has a long rod and a ball on the end of it.

 

This is the end of the wroth tool. I put a dentball on it (and greased it up) and I will pass it through the bell, into the bell bow, where the dent is waiting for me. I start out with smaller dentballs, and do some tapping to get the ridges down, but otherwise it's just bigger and bigger dentballs being passed carefully through.

This is my trumpet on the wroth tool. The rod is handy to have easier access through the stem.

What complicated fancy tool is this to take out blowouts from the trumpet throat? It's curved to the right form and everything!

 

It's just a knife from the salvation army (10 cents) that I annealed (heated until red) and hit with a huge hammer over a mandrel to make it to the right curve so taking out the throat dents will be a breeze.

I took out the teeth of the knife first, so I wouldn't harm the trumpet.

 Time for a lathe project! This time we are making a bearing seater, that will help us put some sort of metal shims back on a horn, I'm sure I'll understand that better once we get to the french horn.

The object is to make a hole for the screw (and threads) and make a big short hole on the other end, so the plastic can push down.

 

This is a mini lathe (not as scary as the big ones), it turns things really fast so we can shape them accordingly to what we want, or drill into them.

Yay, lathe. This me working on a mini lathe.

Drilling the hole for the screw.Keep in mind that the plastic part is spinning, not the drillbit.

Drilling the big hole!

This is the finished product, it looks pretty nice.

This is what the finished product looks like from the side.

Aligning the 3rd slide on a trumpet. It's supposed to run silky smooth without stop, so the player can easily move it while playing.

 Aligning the first slide. This one is harder because it doesn't have a brace on it. Also the lower outer tube is out of round, so we'll have to deal with that before the slide will submit to our will.