Repairing King shoulder mount B flat contras...

[bloke]

... Is weird...

...and I hate replacing wheels on MTS cases..

That is all.


Oh !!!

I did figure out a method for burnishing their bells after I push the dents out of the long parts of them so they don't look lumpy.

I use a 1-in steel round ball (ie. SMALL) inside and a 2-inch magnet (ie. STRONG) on the outside. It's the perfect combination of magnet and ball for smoothing without making tracks in the bell... No, it doesn't look as good as putting it on a dent machine, but there's no damn way to put one of these on a dent machine.

[bloke]

Mrs bloke will tell you that I mostly screwed around today, but I fixed the dog's 60 ft (or however long it is) cable for the umpteenth time (even though he's 12 years old, without the cable he will dig under the fence and he's gone... He loves it here and he loves us, but that's just what Great Pyrenees do... Actually he doesn't take off anymore. After he digs under the fence, he just saunters over to the porch)
...and I got contra number 2 of 3 repaired and contra number 3 of 3... it's bell is off, the solder joints are wiped, I found some stuff that will work to replace broken parts, so it's ready to work on for tomorrow.
After the three contras, I only have three smalls to repair for that school..."Smalls" are anything smaller than a tuba... This includes a euphonium, a marching baritone, and a double horn... The school only had six instruments for us, so I will be able to check them off when those three smalls are done... No woodwinds for them.

These contras' bell flares are so close to the upper bows that - when the upper bows are smashed up and the bell flares are smashed up - it's just not possible to fix either one without taking the bell off, so whatever... At least there's no mouth pipe to deal with... I haven't done tons of these in the past... I'm learning the shortcuts and the fastest non-shortcuts.

I'm getting used to looking at the large ends of their King tuba bottom bows cocked uphill, because the bell comes out a couple of inches away from the top bow, rather than following along right next to it.

[bloke]

Here's the bell for contra # 3 of 3.

They got a B grade dent removal job on this el-smasho, and a C- grade polishing job (ONLY to check for dents and creases which I may have missed which should be removed in a B grade dent removal job).





Bell-off to bell-back-on is about an hour (hurry !!!)

There are some body dents and broken braces as well...
MAYBE (??) I charged enough.