Jan 4
Serpent. C. Baudouin French ca. 1820
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Serpent. C. Baudouin French ca. 1820
That would definitely explain why this trombone was having issues.
May be my new #1 grossest rotary valve I have ever seen. It was so seized up I was worried there may have been something jammed in the valve ports. Couldn't see anything with the endoscope camera, so took a chance at whacking it out and thankfully it was merely full of guck and not physically damaged. Good cleaning should fix this up just fine.
The dented gooseneck and main tuning slide will require a bit more effort.
New chem room is still a work-in-progress but coming along nicely. Definitely enjoying the bathtub we put in a few weeks ago. Not quite large enough to perfectly drop a tuba into, but so many orders of magnitude better than what I used to have. No more washing tubas in a kitchen sink, glory hallelujah.
I spent like an hour and a half removing bits of broken screws from this flugelhorn.
The tip of original lever hinge screw broke off inside the holder. Presumably what happened after that was someone tried to replace the missing screw, except the “new” screw was just a tiny bit wider than the original, so it got really jammed in there and eventually broke too. The connection screw attaching the trigger lever to the 3rd slide also broke at some point in this whole mess, leaving three pieces of screws that needed removing.
Getting the tips of the two original screws out took a bit of time but not too much, but the hinge screw in the key was... stubborn. The well-intentioned-but-wrong-size replacement screw had managed to partially cut its own threads inside the hinge tube before getting stuck and breaking, which made it a right bitch to get out of there. I had to file out the hinge tube and make an oversized replacement hinge screw instead of using an official Yamaha part due to the mangling of the hinge tube.
Left-hand drill bits are the best, by the way, and I find them indispensable and unbeatable for screw extraction. (Why left-hand bits for screw extraction? Because if/when it grabs the broken screw, it will start backing it out of the hole instead of driving it deeper in, as a normal bit would.)
Why does the second bottom valve cap look slightly less gross than the others?
Because most of the guck got left behind, stuck to the casing in one solid mass.