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I, too, have a Holton Revelation 52. It is in pretty nice, original condition. It is also nearly useless, being only somewhat better than one of the original, gigantic Dr. Young things.

I also have three Holton 12 mouthpieces. One is gold-plated, even. (It came to me as part of a trade, I think.) The silver one plays great. The third one has been nickel-plated, and it was then used as the sliding weight of a shop-made slide hammer (for old-school dent pulling).

I swapped a junky piece of mine onto that slide rod and took the beater 12 home. The entry to the throat was scarred up badly from the hex nut on the end of the brass slide rod, but oddly, it plays very nicely.

the elephant wrote: Sat Jan 24, 2026 12:21 pm The entry to the throat was scarred up badly from the hex nut on the end of the brass slide rod, but oddly, it plays very nicely.

...stealing these carelessly-revealed acoustical secrets.

bloke wrote: Sat Jan 24, 2026 11:42 am

arpthark wrote: Sat Jan 24, 2026 9:34 am I also have one, but just marked “52” and not Holton or Revelation or anything like that. It’s a massive, bottomless pit of a funnel, right?

@tubaing - when I did a so-called restoration on his very beat up Holton BB-345 (at his request) elongated the slide tubes on the main tuning slide, because the instrument was sharp natured.

The thing is this:
Playing that instrument with the supplied/stock mouthpiece, I doubt that it was sharp natured at all, but who's going to be playing one of those mouthpieces?

On my Holton, i just had you restore the main tuning slide to the original length. The outer slides were unaltered, but it seems someone cut the inner slides to about half length. So I ended up with very little pull until Joe replaced the inner slides. I wonder if someone took it to a shop because it was playing flat and thats what they did.