That Time I Cut a 186 from BBb to CC…

[the elephant]

This is the thread where I will go into detail about the restoration work I do to my "cut" 186.

There are 14 looooong posts about how I got this horn, why I cut it, what had to be done to make it work, yada, yada, yada. If you have already read this in the original threads, please skip on down to what will become post 15… if I ever get to it, heh, heh…

[the elephant]

The Back Story

[This is a distillation of the original multi-year thread from the other place that was carried over and continued at this site when Rome burned down. There is nothing new in it. If you followed that thread, by all means skip this overlong slog down memory lane.]
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I bought a slightly beat-up, but excellent-playing CC 186 with four valves back in July 2018 from longtime forum member Dan Myer. I loved it. I already had an excellent example of a Jinbao 410 with a gold brass bell that I loved, but it did not growl enough in the low register. Dan assured me that this horn did that, and he was hot to sell it as he wanted the money to kit out his soon-to-arrive child's bedroom. I was helping him sell it, but no one came along with money at the right time.

I ended up buying it sight unseen, and drove to meet him and his family. In short, I loved this tuba to death after the first five or six notes that I played on it. But I was used to having a 5th on all my horns, and even the Jinbao had one. I resolved to find a way to get one installed on that tuba at some point in the future.

Shortly after I got home with this gem, another longtime forum member, Tabor Fisher, sold me a mostly-complete BBb 186 he had taken a few parts from. It was very inexpensive as he had gotten it as a junked parts tuba, and once he got what he wanted from it, he sold it to me. The bell and outer branches were holed, cracked, smashed up, and in pretty bad shape, but he assured me that three of the valves were complete and rotated well enough to be used again. There was also a wealth of damaged parts that could be disassembled and repaired for use on other projects. It looked like a winner to me. I bought it. It was as bad as he said.

I torched it apart and started the cleanup and restoration process. I was shocked at how good the inner branches and valve section were when compared to the outer bows and bell.

Even at that early stage, I was considering getting another junked horn and trying to build one good BBb 186 to sell for enough money to pay for all of this mess. The only stuff I could find was for sale by a Midwestern supplier who is known for his high prices and heavy buffing of used parts. I like that guy a lot, but I can only afford his wares on occasion. So, no, that was not going to happen… but I'd keep my eyes peeled for opportunities as I amassed disposable income.

At this time, I was only just getting back into repair work, after my ten years doing it full time, I had taken five years off, then only did very limited work for a few friends… I had very few tools outside of my mass of automotive tools. You can't fix piston valves using a half-inch breaker bar. From that time to when I bought these two 186s, about ten more years had passed, and — honestly — my skills had atrophied quite a bit.

I *really* wanted to do some nice work to the CC four-banger 186, so I decided after my first few small projects that I would try to fix its problems one at a time by practicing on the junk tuba first. This paid off tremendously, as I was able to carefully practice everything over and over without consequences to the "good" tuba.

So I worked on both tubas as separate projects, with the CC always being a few steps behind the BBb. And at one point, I realized I was fooling myself, thinking I would be happy with a halfway job.

Some additional background:

I traded a sort of rare rotary valve of another make for a smaller-than-a-186 Miraphone rotor of unknown size, but the photos clearly showed a modern, plain-faced valve that had never been installed on anything. I wanted it because these valves are expensive and very well made.

I bought a set of parts to install a 5th valve to a tuba using Miraphone's newer lever design, the thumb bar. It was about 90% complete, just missing the two rod end bearings.

I bought a genuine Miraphone 186 CC leadpipe to try on the Jinbao. It was pre-bent and had a receiver installed by them.

So, at this point, I started working more seriously on the CC 186, even taking it completely down with my acetylene torch to "iron" smooth on my dent machine. I had not done this much work on my Z-60 in years, and you can truly FUBAR an instrument with one of these if you are not well-practiced, so I started working on the bottom bow first. Except that I actually started smoothing out the cracked and very holey BBb bottom bow. It came out really nice, except that in working out the crushed small side with its razor-sharp "shark's fin" seam, about 30 pinholes opened up. Not a problem, though. It was just practice using old junk. Ha, ha.

So I tossed the garbagy bow to the side once it looked pretty good, and I felt ready to tackle the much nicer CC bottom bow.

I did this for about a week. In the end, I had a set of excellent CC branches and bell, and a set of pretty nice, actually pretty usable BBb parts, but all the big ones leaked like a garden sprinkler.

Back to work on the CC for a while…
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Once I had the CC branches nicely smoothed and rounded, I pimped them out with a pair of new nickel silver ferrules, upper and lower guards. and a keel, and found that I had all this nickel silver "waste" that I decided to smooth out and store for future projects. The same parts on the BBb 186 were in pretty mediocre condition, being heavily pitted from the sweat of "young scholars" along with a lot of gouges, scratches, and other damage that made them look pretty tatty. But I fixed them up as much as I could and stored them, too.

At this time, I decided that since I had broken the piggy bank, and because Miraphone parts purchased directly from the company were so reasonably priced, I would not restore this tuba but "remanufacture" it as with automotive component remanufacturing. I would try my best to "blueprint" it and replace all bearing surfaces with new metal. I would retain all the sound-producing brass parts. I would also buy a new bell garland with engraving, since Miraphone still does some engraving work.

Aaaaaaaaand no, they don't.

First bump in the long road ahead of me: Miraphone informed me that they no longer engrave anything in-house. All bells are laser etched, assembly numbers are stamped, and there are no parts that are engraved by hand these days. Sorry, sir. You're SOL. Guten Abend.

Then I received an email a few days later from Eva informing me that a suitable engraver had been given a chance to measure and photograph a classic 86 tuba with a fully engraved bell. He had been informed that I wanted it spelled with the US-market "F" version of the company name. He agreed and gave them a quote. They added a cartage fee for driving it into Munich and back in an employee's personal car. I was presented with a quote, and I accepted it.

When it was delivered, I noticed that the excellently done engraving was projected onto a flat surface and from there to an old-style pantograph to make a stencil, and in doing this, the engraver introduced a bit of anamorphic stretch. So the engraving looks identical, except that the letters are a little too narrow.

damndamndamndamndamn…

Okay, that cost me a lot. However, it is, nonetheless, a very beautiful bit of hand engraving.
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Somewhere along the way, I decided that I wanted to see whether I could still patch cracks and holes without using physical patches. I do patching work for people on request and have become very good at it over the decades. However, I always swore that I would not put patches on my personal instruments. I know from experience that red rot patched over never solves the issue. A leadpipe rots from the inside, so when you patch a few pinholes, there are lots of thin spots under the patch, and the leadpipe really needs to be replaced. You can get by with patching for many years, but eventually the pipe has to go.

And I dislike how patches look unless a great deal of care went into making said patches.

On this tuba, the patches would be very large, and there would be a lot of them. In imagining what this would end up looking like, I decided that this junk tuba deserved more careful work, and I wanted to reeducate myself. So I decided that all leaks would be silver soldered.

I did not need to do this for the good CC 186. I just wanted to do it. Everything else on this disaster tuba was in very decent condition. Some parts were missing, but more or less, it was a complete, beat-to-hades BBb 186.

Maybe I should try to rebuild it along with the CC.
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I fixed everything. However, the bottom bow was full of embrittlement, with spider cracks all over this one section; hundreds of them; hundreds. And after all the heavy de-denting, those cracks had gone all the way through the brass in many places. (The bottom bow eventually had over 40 leaks!) I know that if I ever have to take a dent out of that section of the bow, it will pop out like a cork. and I'll have a quarter-dollar-sized hole in the bow. The two 2-inch cracks and the quarter-inch diameter hole in the bows, and the three 2-inch cracks through the bell flare, all closed up nicely, but that bottom bow has been a source of worry for me ever since.

So, junk parts fixed.
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Next (for this specific tuba), I ordered up all the parts that were missing, including a new bell garland. The modern kranzes are not engraved, as I said earlier. They retain the two double-rows of "dots" and look quite nice — a LOT nicer than the torn, burnt, mangled garland that came on this tuba. When I ordered the high zoot engraved garland, I added the parts for this tuba (and the blank garland) to the order.

I now have all the broken stiff fixed and all the missing stuff on the way. I'm going to have a tricked-out CC and what might turn out to be a very nice BBb. Mirafone tubas were very consistent within their various generations, for the most part. Joe likes the generation following this one, but I prefer these. And my CC was a great player. So it made sense to me that my pile of junk tuba ought to turn out to be very good, too.

Because, according to Miraphone, the serial numbers place the CC manufacture time at November 1971 and this BBb at February 1971. (Hey, that is fifty-five years ago right now!)

So if the CC came from a very good era at Waldkraiburg, it seems to me that a horn only eight months older might also be expected to be equally good.

Then it hit me: How hard would it be for me to cut it to CC, making it into a backup CC for me? Like a warm-up tuba that sits out on a stand waiting for me to walk past and pick it up and run a few exercises? That would be a great thing to have. How good would it be? My limited experience with cutting horns is that you cannot improve an instrument by cutting it, but you can certainly turn an excellent instrument into a bowser. But for a silly warm-up instrument, it would not really need to be anything worthy of a letter to mama.

Hmmmmmmmmm…

[the elephant]

I tore this horn down after I got it unboxed. It was in sorry condition, as I was told, but the price was very low, and, frankly, I needed some parts for my CC rebuild.

I first removed all the lacquer, then scrubbed and sanded off some very hard, very black lacquer that would not come off with the gel stripper I like to use. Once the subassemblies were lacquer-free, I dipped everything into a tank of full-strength white vinegar to clean the insides of everything.

Then I unsoldered every tube, ferrule, and brace, cleaned up all the excess solder, rewashed it all, bagged and marked it all, and put it into some plastic storage containers so I would not misplace anything.

I had made a large order of stuff from Miraphone, and in that I added enough new screws for two complete tubas. Everything — x2. (I have a real thing about boogered-up screw heads.)



I was fairly far along with the CC project 186 and had reached a major turning point. I ordered all new valves and replacement inner and outer slide leg tubing. So that means that I had about four sets of old, beater rotary valves from the CC, this BBb, and my old collection of valves. So new valves for the CC, and the pick of the litter (well, five picks) for this tuba!



I could assemble a second set of very nice, classic valves (with the stamped decorative "coin" on top that matches the design on the rear cap. (The new valves do not have this decorative figuration. I would need to make a 5th valve by putting a 1st rotor into a 3rd casing, and doing some surgery. First, the stop arm had to have the arm itself removed and rebrazed 90º from where it comes from the factory. And I would have to remove and rotate one of the knuckles by 90º, which is not fun to do.

I could not really afford to do all this nice work to the CC and the BBb, but the CC was receiving so many new parts that I realized that I had everything needed to build another CC, once the inner branches were chopped to the correct lengths. All I really needed after that was the leadpipe, which I already had, and the dogleg from the 5th valve to the main slide. So I added one of them to the order for the CC and would take all the nice, used parts from the CC and put them on the newly cut bugle of the BBb… once that had been done. I was still sort of fishy on doing that part…

The only issues would be creating the 5th valve and its slide circuit (two slides, actually) and figuring out what could be salvaged from the poorly laid out BBb 4th slide circuit to make something like the excellent circuit on the CC.

[the elephant]

Photo dump time…





















Cracks brazed…


The heavy-handed work I had to do on this old bell required some annealing, then a lot more pressure from the Z-60 than I was comfortable with, resulting in too much surface area for the shape. This shows itself through bulges or waviness, and it can be hard to work out if you are not experienced doing this. Trying to avoid destroying a bell that is this badly damaged can be stressful.



Sorry. I'll stop with the Opera memes…

Here is the waviness…


I eventually worked out most of the excess surface area to the outer edges, which will have to be trimmed off. This sort of work is more about moving metal around (thickness) rather than "dent" work.


After brazing cracks shut and working out most of the waviness…


Old School…


I did not want to overwork this beater bell. I am not good at dealing with brittle, cracking parts. Sure, you can anneal them, but that is not a good thing to keep doing to a piece. So I only took the work to a minimal level, and zero sanding was done as this stuff is now REALLY thin after all of that hamfisted smooshing in the Z-60. The bell is not about a quarter of an inch larger in diameter, and I have to figure out how to measure, mark, and trim that off… and I get ONE TRY.


Lots of unfixed stuff, in an attempt to not "overfix" it so that it no longer plays well. There are two folded-over, badly stretched spots due to very deep dents being "fixed" by someone using a BFH and only half a brain. (Note: NOT ME.) Unfortunately, this stuff has to stay there for now. <sigh>

[the elephant]

After heating the flare to help flatten the waviness, I was able to get the edge flat enough to mark it against the wire from the new garland. I can then trim the ends back and try to install the new kranz.


You can see how some parts of the edge expanded outwards more than others. That is because I had to use high pressure (which I hate doing) over large areas, and the larger the area, the more metal was moved toward the edge through the wall of the bell being thinned a tiny amount. The darker areas are either from annealing or brazing. This bell was a mess!


The new garland fits well!




My first attempt to install a kranz. It is not easy, nor is it for the faint of heart. This was after hours of hammer work. It was going really well… and then it wasn't. I discovered that the rim of the bell was too large in three spots. I had to remove the garland, reshape the mangled lip, and try again. I eventually got it well enough, but it still looks bad, so I plan to adjust the flare edge one last time. Then I'll install the spend-tastic engraved garland. I'll try not to FUBAR the thing. <eye roll>

[the elephant]

Cracks to braze after branches have been cut…






Initial comparison of BBb and CC parts — lots to hack out…




Factory CC 3rd, 4th, and 5th branches on the left, Redneck versions on the right. Note the different length/shape of the "pretel" 5th branch. I'm gonna have to fix that…


Flip side. You can really see how much adjustment will have to be made to the pretzel…


First dry fit of bugle branches. All the cut ends had to be retapered to fit the ferrules (and sort of restore the taper of the bugle… sort of… I hope…)


Factory CC on the left. How close did I get it? Notice that the bottom bow of the CC has a bell ferrule, which makes it look different from the cut branches next to it.


These parts have been repaired and are ready to assemble. This is now a CC tuba!

[the elephant]

I had a big box of rotary valves in various states of disrepair. Some had bad bearings, some leaked, some did not turn well. One just did not turn.

I did not want to mess with doing the work needed to properly reverse the rotation of the 3rd and 4th. Some people laugh at this, but it makes a big difference for me. This removes a huge break in the air stream that is easy to feel, and that causes a lot of needless work to smooth out those breaks in slurs. Some folks do not feel this. I have no idea what's wrong with them. Bless their poor, little hearts…



After about a week of putzing around with various combos of parts, I came up with four excellent valves that do not leak. Then I worked very hard to make them leak by venting them. Another mod that baffles some folks, there are two purposes for doing this, and you can look them up on your own dime. This is already stupid-long, and I need to move on.

I had to cobble together parts to make a usable 5th valve, which is a strange valve when compared with a normal one. First, you need a case for a 3rd valve and a rotor for a 1st valve, then you have to remove the stop arm post from the part of the stop arm that fits over the valve stem and rotate it 90º from where it had been. Then you have to remove and rotate by 90º one of the case knuckles. This last bit is pretty tricky.

Here I have gathered all the junk needed to do this work. Actually, you need a good drill press, but my Chinese one is a POS and cannot do this, so I have to get on the Struggle Bus and take a ride to get the holes centered and straight using my Mk 1 Eyecrometer.


Not perfect, but good enough. I confirmed that it won't leak after deburring the case.


These vents are intrusive and are essentially big-ass leaks that you intentionally put into these expensive parts. Normally, these halp with keeping pressures balanced between the open horn and the sealed-off valve circuits. When you play (especially on a cold stage), your warm breath heats the inside of the horn, but not the valve circuits. These stay cooler, and when you open the valve, a tiny pop can be heard and felt by the player. On some horns and for some players, this can cause breaks in slurred lines. No bueno. So a tiny hole is introduced in a location that will not cause a leak when you are playing. When you use the valve, it is a part of the air column, and when you do not, the hole allows the internal pressure to float with that in the rest of the horn, removing those bumps in the air as you move the valves.

Then, for a slide where you have to make a lot of tuning corrections, an unvented valve will have a serious pressure POP if you adjust and then press the valve. Since you need to have the slide adjusted BEFORE you press the valve, this introduces a vacuum if you pull out, and an overpressure if you push in. So a vent helps the slide circuit air pressure stay equal to the outside pressure as you move the slide in or out by allowing the needed transfer of air as you go. However, if you just vent with an itty-bitty hole like needed to keep normal pressure differences at bay, the vent will "wheeze" when you move the slide quickly and a long way. The amount of air you have to suck in or push out with the slide is too much for the tiny hole, and it makes an audible sound, like sniffing.

A larger hole will almost certainly leak, even if very well aligned. My way of doing this has always been to put three or four of the iddy-bitty holes in a line. They will not leak, and they will flow enough air to prevent the wheeze.


Buffing, buffing, buffing…


Et VOILÀ ! We have gone from a pile of dirty junk to expensive components…




Regular vent on left, 1st slide vent on right…


Going through the pile, searching for ferrules from the same era. I have ferrules with ornamentation from three different eras at Miraphone, and while they are all "the same," they look like mismatched junk when next to each other. In this shot, I have dug up a full set of matching valve connecting ferrules. Yippee!


The "coin" cap on top of Miraphone rotary valves is to "hide the seams" of how they are assembled. It is actually a nicely stamped, thin sheet of nickel silver. The filigree is stamped, too, on the later versions of this "coin" (but this one appears to have been engraved by hand). The edge is fake, too, stamped and shaped to make the part look much thicker than it is.

[the elephant]

The bugle is not the only part of the horn that has to be shortened to play in the key of C; every slide circuit has to be shortened by the same percentage that the bugle was chopped.

That is a lot of math for a lunkhead such as myself.

So I tried to figure out a way around that.

And I did.

It seems that Miraphone, in a mad attempt to make enough profit to stay afloat, worked it out so that the inner and outer slide legs are usable on both the BBb and CC versions of the horn. But they are used on different valves! CLEVER! I figured that out, too, so I can cut the valve section without actually cutting anything. (If you ever want to do this, contact me and I will tell you what goes where.) Here is a BBb 1/2/3 section that is the correct length to play a whole step sharp. I don't believe I had to cut anything in this photo except for the two 2nd slide outer tubes. And I hand-cut the decorative rings at the valve end of the tubes. Can you tell I did that by hand? Bravo, me!


More on those lovely, hand-cut decorative rings…

They have to match the spacing and distance from the end of the little ferrule next to them. I did this with a jeweler's coping saw.




One is factory work, one is mine. Which one did I do?


Completed 2nd valve unit…


Competed 1/2/3 valve section!

[the elephant]

More coming soon!

[TheBerlinerTuba]

Hello Elephant,

bravo again for your excellent work with attention to detail.

If you ever decide to vent rotary valves again, here are a few small tips.

1. Drill the vent hole either higher or lower into the casing. That way you can use a larger hole without the need for perfect valve bumper alignment. It will also reduce the wooshing sound significantly.
2. If it's still not quiet enough, drill and tap the vent hole. You can then thread a tube into the valve and it will act as a muffler and will be virtually silent.

Cheers, TheBerlinerTuba

[bloke]

A while ago, I began drilling the holes towards the top myself, particularly in the newer age whereby more different makers of rotary valves have sort of copied the old school B&S way of making rotor bodies and casings as small as possible (achieving a lighter touch), but this also defines that the spaces between the air passages are quite narrow.
(Here's just one example of this: Modern Miraphone .835" bore rotor bodies and casings are now built on the same "frame" - so to speak - as their common .772" bore rotor casings (model 86, etc.)
Compared to those old huge rotor bodies that they formerly used for that very large bore size, the new ones are actually even faster when they cut them out to .835" than when they cut them out .772" (as there is so little metal left in the rotor body), but - again - this defines that the wall between the air passages is quite narrow, and thus venting becomes quite critical, if the vent hole is drilled right in the crotch of the casing between the knuckles.

[the elephant]

Okay, so that first bit was ridiculously long, so you can guess the rest of how it was built using the junk of ages. I eventually DID build a 5th valve. That is the only really interesting stuff left to describe.

I took a junk valve to practice on, heated the case until it was glowing bright red to melt the silver solder holding the valve case together, keeping the flame around the knuckle that needed to be "turned". Once I had it free from the case, I was able to carefully file and sand the edges of the hole and the knuckle until I could fit them together both natively and in the new configuration. I was lucky in that the knuckle was removed without any sort of damage or deformation.

Once the parts were ready, I dropped in the valve and started getting the knuckle to fit without leaks or dragging against the case wall and rotor body. The fit is fairly tight, so this was easy to do. However, the tight fit was from the original silver solder, and when I heated it again to reattach it, this would melt, causing the knuckle to suddenly shift position, so I used my silver soldering jig to help hold everything together without shifting as stuff melted.

The decorative "coin" top cover of the case came off. I cleaned it up and reattached it with a lower temp of silver solder so that nothing else could come loose when I did the work. (You can get silver solder or brazing rods in a whole range of flow temps, and if you plan carefully, you can silver solder very complex things together by starting with the hardest stuff and working your way down in temp. This works well for me up to about three passes. Once I have that many steps, I start having problems with over-annealing, so that the part becomes junk.

If I have to do something in steps like this, I generally have the solder set on a tray with big labels (A, B, C, etc.) so that I can quickly do everything in one. long pass, eliminating any additional heat cycles. I don't know whether this does any good, but it keeps the flame off the part a lot more than doing it in several complete cycles, whereby you allow cooling between each assembly. I'm just guessing, here. But so far, every time I have done stuff like this, it has worked out fine.

I also altered a stop arm to move the stop pin 90º to orient the rotor correctly. This was time-consuming, but not difficult at all.

The issue with this homemade 5th valve was that I chose to practice this on a junk valve — in case I FUBARed it.

I didn't, so I felt obligated to use it. To make it a good valve, I needed to tighten up the top bearing.

I did that, but it was not a very good job. I then passed it on to a friend, who later decided not to add a 5th to his 186. So I recently got it back.

Yesterday I decided to take a whack at that top bearing, and it did not go as I had hoped, but it is a lot better than it was. I may work on it some more in the future, but I am happy to install it as it is right now.

But not ecstatic…





This is an old-style clockwise-rotating 3rd/4th valve case. (Note the screw holes to affix the cork plate to the lower half of the case face.) I have rotated the NW knuckle to point upwards rather than to the left, as with the SW corner knuckle. This allows for the Miraphone 5th slide routing to work using stock parts.


Here is the very thin, stamped "coin" to cover the case joints. I have never had one of these come off, so obviously, I had to use too much heat to get the knuckle off. This is part and parcel of work like this. Unfortunately, the product for this called Heat Fence does not seem to be available these days, which is a shame. The edges have been stamped, and the knurled edge is part of that process. It is as thin as slide tubing.


After being pickled in vinegar for a while, this is what it looks like prior to having the coin reinstalled and then being buffed. My joint is on the far left. Note the stop arm. You can see how the pin had to be rotated to orient the rotor as needed.


My work was to the lower, right knuckle, and the factory work is to the left.


The left knuckle originally pointed toward the camera.


Nearest to the camera…

[the elephant]

All of the branches had been repaired, trimmed, and retapered.

The slide circuits had been made the correct length.

I decided to use a much better valve for 5th, and did all the work needed to use it, EXCEPT for rotating the knuckle. I put together a set of parts that would accept the incorrect knuckle and would be of the correct length. However, the lower slide legs are shorter than stock because a good four inches of length was added to allow for the use of the unturned valve knuckle. So all four slide leg sets are an inch shorter than what Miraphone makes.

I had a complete set of parts for the 5th lever and Minibal linkage system.

I had all the parts to convert the linkage of valves 1-4 to Minibal.

So I built the thing, deciding to use it at work for a while despite the ugly bell garland (still much less ugly than in the single photo I decided to share. (It took me three tries to get it to where it is. The photo was of the first attempt, and it was horrible!)

I figured out the pitch, and it really is not bad at all. I was expecting all sorts of weirdness, but it is pretty tame. It is much better than a simple "warm-up tuba" and can be used in my job. Therefore, I have decided to take it all back down and do the same sort of careful work I did to assemble the factory CC, and to really spend time on the bell garland. There is no reason for it to look any different than a factory install if I am extremely careful and accurate in re-trimming the bell flare edge. I have fixed the 5th valve top bearing well enough that I can use it, giving me the freedom to try to rotate the knuckle on the much nicer valve I have been using. If it "goes south" on me, I have the existing valve to use.

I have two more excellent 1st/2nd rotor units so that I can make all the valves rotate counterclockwise, as with current Miraphone tubas.

I also have a modern 186 leadpipe. This tuba was modified to fit a modern pipe's dimensions, so that will not be an issue. The pipe on it right now is probably a bit too fast-opening. (It was made from the pipe used on 188 tubas.) The inner branches on this tuba are skinnier than on a factory CC (they used to be longer, so the taper rate was slower. Remember?) So a blown-out leadpipe gives it a sound quality that I am not excited about. Don't get me wrong: It is very good as it is now. (I used it for some Wagner in the orchestra recently.) But this tuba seems to want to be more like a 185, so the smaller, stock leadpipe might give it more zip. If that works out, I might make this my full-time quintet tuba and dump my F from that role. I like it that much.

The Swiss cheese bottom bow was slightly misshapen during the extreme dent work to save it. (It had been crushed more or less flat from the outside (small end) of the bow in toward the inside face of the bow. Not flattened front-to-back, but from outside to inside. It works, but it will never be very good, and it causes some assembly compromises to use, due to that misshapenness. I am getting another bottom bow that was rescued by Joe. I am excited to get it into my hands, but I cannot really get to this rebuild until about June. So I will pick it up when we are both available, and lining up our schedules is not that easy; we both are busy guys.

Anyway, that is where this is as of today, February 18, 2026. I am getting stuff ready for this project. Here are the replacement 3rd, 4th, and 5th valves.

All the ferrules are just press-fit. I was screwing around. Sorry…

[the elephant]

I promise… I'm trying to wrap up the "topic review" section of this thread. However, I am not quite there yet.
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So, with everything more or less ready to go, I assembled this Frankentuba first, repeating each step with the same one on the factory CC 186. The only real differences in these two 1971 tubas were that I already KNEW that the factory CC was a winner before I started, whereas the BBb cut horn was a complete mystery. I had never played it, and based on its condition when it arrived at my house, no one else had either, likely for decades.

Again, the BBb horn has a slower taper rate as it has to connect the same bell to the same initial taper of the leadpipe, but it has to carry that taper for an additional 24 inches.

This means that the CC bugle is fatter than the BBb. Parts laid out next to one another show the BBb instruments parts to be longer and skinnier. To share the bell, the CC ended up having nearly the same internal fluid volume as the BBb version.

This means that my homemade CC is actually a smaller horn than the factory one. It falls between a 186 and a 185 in weight of tone and overall "feel".

The factory CC had a larger-than-normal leadpipe. I had Miraphone bend a nickel silver leadpipe for me using the tube for a 188, which really helped the horn in the orchestra. I had an additional (sort of beat up) NS 188 pipe bent for a 186 and slapped it on this horn, and (unlike with the larger factory CC) it does not feel like it belongs on the horn. I have a new style, stock 186 brass pipe here, too, and intend to try it on this tuba, which I think might make this tuba into a wonderful quintet instrument.

Here you can see the result of my chopping this BBb to match my CC. They are not even on the rug pattern, so the cut horn looks smaller, but this is not the case. Note the differences between the two 5th valve knuckles. This version of the cut horn has the cobbled-together 5th valve, but the knuckle has not yet been turned, and the slide is built to work around that. It needs to be corrected because you cannot get to the 3rd slide without a great deal of effort.





The new work will be detailed starting with the next post. So this may get pushed pretty far down before I bump it again. If this is the case, thanks for reading, and see you all again once I get back to work. The first posts in this project will be disassembly and cleanup work.

Cheers!

[the elephant]

POST 15

There's nothing here yet. Check back later. I will start the new material here.

[bloke]

...but I just had to look...having read the booooook...

[prodigal]

You guys are my heroes, bringing life to these random parts into beautiful Mirafones!

[Wookieman]

Great work. I love seeing something old being brought back to life. I hope you are able to make music with it for many years when it is done.

[jose the tuba player]

man this makes me miss tinkering with junk horns, the prices of everything has gone up so much its not really easy to justify buying more tubas.

[the elephant]

Next major hurdle cleared: I drove up to meet with bloke and picked up the 1965 bottom bow he rescued and "slicked out" for me.

I love it.

Spring Break is next week, and my limping Jeep and this old tuba are all I've got on my dance card. I can start taking it apart and working on the bell garland.

I have to pull the bell garland and re-trim the bell edge… which must meet the wire just so… and I did not make it just so when I did this six years ago.

I have worked out how to correct everything so that the kranz fits perfectly, which will greatly help my end product. I am looking forward to doing this again. If it goes well and the bell looks nice, I will invest the time needed to really make this a sweet tuba.

THANKS, BLOKE! (Lunch with the two ladies was a lot of fun. Good to see you again!)

Photos of the 1965 bottom bow…









All it needs is a keel, which I have in a box in my shop…


Apparently, the inside seam had some issues, so it was more expedient to add sousaphone guard wire to seal it. Looks great!