End of Semester

I just finished the first semester in Red Wing. It's too cold so I am happy to be home in FL :) I had a lot of fun, made a lot of friends, and learned a lot. I look forward to learning more. I miss the friends I have made but I don't miss this...

Hooray for a successful semester in Red Wing!!

Tuba Project

A Tuba came in to our shop from our finacial aid advisor, Anne in the school. Her son is just learning ho to play and needed a tuba at home to practice. Anne got the tuba from her nefew that used to play it. The tuba was in very bad shape and had broken valve stems. The repair techs that last worked on this did some faulty repairs such as soldering the valve stems into the piston. One of the was silver soldered! Also, the pistons were sanded and looked really bad. The tuba itself has many dents and desperately needed a chem flush. We didn't do any dent work on it because we just needed it to play. Here's what we did...

We put it in the Ultra Sonic Cleaner

The Sound vibrations and mild acid help free the dirt and scale inside the instrument...

We also cleaned all the slides and parts including the pistons...

We decided to make new vlave stemssince the other ones were in very bad shape. They were bent, dirty, and corroded. Plus, the threads were shot... We unsoldered them too. Only one of the four was in good shape so we used that one as a guideline to make the others.

We soldered brass plugs into the pistons so we could make new threads. I drilled holes in the plugs and then used a tap to make the threads...

Lee drilled holes and tapped the new valve stems. He also made the outer threads. He buffed them and they looked great!

We had Carl play test it after we did the porting. We were proud of our new valve stems. The tube is currently in the hads of a happy fifth grader :)