Posted by Wade on January 21, 2004 at 17:37:56:
In Reply to: Brass Overhaul Text posted by ready for adventure on January 21, 2004 at 15:38:57:
Go to the following link. Buy the Eric Brand repair manual (sold by Ferree's Tools (or maybe it's Allied...).
Most schools will only tell you how to fix basic (and obvious) stuff, while not giving you enough real experience to learn to diagnose problems. I understand that the school in Renton, Washington is an exception. Red Wing is very cursory, while the degree program at Western Iowa Tech is much more solid. But much is still lacking.
Best method to get knowledge, period, is as an apprentice to a real, live brass stud-god. But for what you are looking at doing, just hanging around a shop for a summer will teach you how hard and dangerous the job is.
Taking apart and putting back together a tuba on your won is NOT the way to learn, unless you are POSITIVE that having a nice box of junk parts is an acceptable outcome. Because there is a very real risk that this will be the end result. The work is not all that hard to understand, but tubas are very easy to bend out of shape due to the extreme thinness of the tube walls when compared to the tube diameter. But, while easy to butcher, tuba bows are a real bitch to bend back without ovalizing the tubing.
My advice is to go spend $50 - $75 on a pawn shop beater trumpet: a real dog. Go torch happy with that instead, since cheap trumpets are easy to replace. Take it apart and put it together many times to get really comfortable with the torch/flux/solder thing. Pay particular care to learning to do the 2nd valve braces to the bell and the leadpipe, as the valve casing thickness vs. the brace flange and bell thickness will cause you much consternation at first. Learning to keep the flame moving constantly and to the thicker side takes a lot of screw-ups to really get the knack. And this is how a lot of tuba work will be: soldering things of very different thicknesses. The thick part will act as a heat sink and take forever to heat evenly, while the other side will heat right away. You REALLY need to get used to this before butchering your sacrificial tuba.
If you get even passably decent, the tuba might be good enough to give to a local school when you are finished playing with it.
But if you start with the tuba, it will most certainly not go back together correctly if you try to do any dent work at all to the bows.
Read the Brand book and heed it. It may be old, and many of the procedures might have been simplified by better and more specialized tooling, but everything outlined in that (1930's era) book still works and will still give great results when executed with the proper skills. And that skill comes only through massive repetition.
Learning to repair a tuba is much like learning to play a tuba, huh? Except that botching your scales does not render the tuba forever unplayable.
Be careful.
Wade