I'm teaching a friend how to repair trombone slides.

[bloke]

my way, and not the way I understand that most people do them.

He teaches low brass at a university and has become interested in repair. He has a building in his backyard and was going to turn it into a guest house and rent it out, but instead he's turned it into a workshop, and bought a bunch of brass repair tools.

I'm sure he became interested in this from watching me work on his instruments. He lives a couple hundred miles south of me.

Yet another university ended up with their trombone professor becoming the chairman, so that person has pulled all of their nicest trombones away from the band program and has me more or less (for the lack of a better description) "blueprinting" them.

We did one and a half slide overhauls while my friend was visiting for a day. (He had to leave before the second one was finished due to that big storm front, which was concerning.) He was nervous, because these are not beginner trombones we were repairing, but he was really good at following instructions and actually taking down some notes. Also, he cautiously under-did instead of overdid when I let him put his hands on these instruments, which is good because that means he didn't do any damage.

I believe he'll end up being pretty good at this. Based on what I've witnessed, not many people who repair trombone slides are particularly good at it, whereby sometimes it might have been better to leave them the way they were.
One of the reasons that I suspect he'll become pretty good at doing this is because right when each tube was as absolutely straight as I knew I was going to be able to get each individual tube, he would speak up suddenly and say "You had better stop there". ...so he already has the "eye". He also demonstrated very strong acuity for finding the tiniest little dents in the tubes.

Trombone slides require more skill than just about anything else involved with brass repair, other than possibly complete valve rebuilding, but complete valve rebuilding partially relies on very good machinery, whereas trombone slide rebuilding is just about completely reliant on the skills of the person doing the work.

The first one turned out exceptionally good, and the second one (after he left and I soldered the assemblies back together after the tubes were free of dents and straightened) turned out just as nice. Both of those were Bach Stradivarius model 42 slides. Before I move on to the bass trombones (whereby it's been requested that I split the linkage...and those of you who play bass trombone know what this means) there's one more 42 to do. It's an old rough one with very little lacquer left on it, and I'm sure it's been marched with every year for the past who knows how many years. It will probably be more of a challenge. I don't think I'll have to replace any of the tubes, but we'll have to see.

The first one that I did for this university (quite a few months ago, before I had to set these instruments aside to get back to them later, which I'm doing now) was a early 1980s Minick/L.A. influence era single rotor Conn bass trombone (first version of the 110H... Do I have the model number correct?) that was really beat up. That one was quite a challenge...so many things wrong, and so many things repaired improperly...and that was the one that the trombone teacher/chairman was the most interested in. It was pretty challenging, but I brought it back. (I'm not any sort of bass trombonist, but - after I repaired it and played on it - it didn't offer that trademark Conn type of sound that I expected to hear based on the old 71/72/73H instruments, but was quite bright/brassy-sounding... at least, in my judgment.
OK...
I found a post on Facebook where I discussed repairing that old 110H...
https://www.facebook.com/groups/basstro ... 659458722/

...back to your regularly-scheduled discussions over which tuba bags are best...

[Bassboner]

Trombone slides... and as a subset of trombone slides is the speech repairmen feel obliged to give bone players about how difficult it is to remove leadpipes (which in trombones are fitted inside the upper slide tube). Just for reference, even mediocre repair people get the leadpipes out in one piece 90% of the time, even on the dozens of old horns I've owned.

On old slides a lot of people freak out if there is ANY wear through of the chrome plate. I gotta say that the plating is less important than most people think. First, it can be an indicator of bad alignment or bad maintenance/lubrication. And very often, even slides with plating loss can work really well. Sometimes just turning the tubes to get the wear out of the plane of the slide (or simply (re)aligning the tubes makes all the difference. I've got great slides with scary amounts of plating loss. Old Conns and Yamahas have bad reputations for plating loss, although for different reasons.

A lot of finger-wagging perfectionists freak out about replacing slide tubes on classic (collectible) bones. They want everything to be original. In my mind, if you're playing it and you like it, do what it takes to make it playable. It's of no value as a player if it's mechanically impossible to play. Just to say that I've put Yamaha parts on worn out great-playing classic Conns when it made sense and worked great.

I've mostly given up taking slides to my local guy, though. I'd rather play on a 7/10 slide than let them work on it. Often, as bloke says, they just come back with a different set of problems. That's the difference between an $70 slide job and a $250 slide job, I guess. My last slide went out to Scott Sweeney in Raleigh NC. He's not really a slide specialist, but he's a great tech overall. If I had a horn where I really needed just the slide fixed, I'd send it to "The Slide Dr." in Alabama I think.

I buy a lot of questionable stuff off of eBay without the chance to really check it out or play it beforehand, and so I wind up taking a lot of iffy horns to my local guy for simple stuff like dents, valve alignments, resoldering braces, cleaning, delacquering, etc. I'm sure they're no better or worse than the stuff he sees from the local schools. But yeah, slides are the tricky parts, and a bad slide makes an otherwise great horn instantly unplayable. Honestly, a great slide can make you want to invent a reason to play even a crappy horn.

[bloke]

Mouthpipe tube extraction depends on a few things:

- the way that a particular manufacturer installs them
- how delicate (thin-walled) they are
- how badly cemented into the inside playing slide tube they are with hard scale or how badly rotted they are (again, due to decades of exposure to hard scale).

If a replacement is the same length as the one that had to be sacrificed (and the expansion taper isn't radically different), it's going to play very nearly the same. First, the beginning of it has to receive the mouthpiece down to a choke point, and the far end has to reach to nearly the bore of the instrument and end up extremely thin (though some of those that unscrew and are swappable aren't nearly as thin as they ought to be on the large end, because makers are probably afraid that user/players are going to dent them). Oh yeah, there can be concave, convex, and straight tapers, but a really sucky slide is going to have about 98% more effect on how a trombonist is playing vs. a very subtle difference in front end resistance. I always try to extract and reuse them. Besides being cemented in with hard scale, some of them are rotted away to nothing via dezinctification. When I replace them with the same make and model of mouthpipe (when occasionally hopelessly stuck or rotted), no one has ever complained. It actually requires a pretty crazy amount of difference in the bow of the taper for a player to notice a difference, and I've noted that they notice more difference (again) when a replacement is longer or shorter than the original versus how bowed the taper is (within a reasonably small amount). A player is going to adjust to make their sound, regardless of or in spite of subtle differences.

I've replaced mouthpipes on my own tubas that weren't exactly the same taper, and it took me about five to ten minutes to not notice the difference, because I likely subtly adjusted my own playing.

The way to avoid ever having to replace a trombone slide mouthpipe tube is to not hit the slide against things, not to drop the trombone on the floor and to keep the inside of it clean.
ie. "Hey, I didn't break it; you did."

If interested, I could outline my last resort method for getting the most stuck and the most delicate mouthpipe tubes out of inside slide tubes.