Holton 345 Redux

[the elephant]

Fussbudget to the power of 10!

That's IT! Her name! She has never had one before, and I just named her by accident. This tuba is named for the most famous fussbudget of all time: Lucy Van Pelt!

[prairieboy1]

Perfection!

[the elephant]

Today I finished* the bugle. I am extremely happy.

Tomorrow I can start to mount the valves to the horn and either reuse my leadpipe or bend a new one. Once that is done I can begin assembling (and finish figuring out) the outer half of the 4th slide circuit.

The final stage will be to design, measure, cut, and build the 5th slide.

It is getting done.

Finishing up this stage involved me spending all morning rummaging around in my various brace boxes after realizing that I had lost two of the needed braces (OH, YOU STUPID MAN!) and that for the tight spaces they were needed to fill none of my brand new stuff would work. So the four braces were one made of new King parts, an Olds oval-footed one I had to hack up with a Dremel, something off of a K-90 contrabass bugle, and an old, used, brown Allied Universal Brace with the ugly, round feet. It is the only round-footed brace on the horn. Also, the old King bugle brace is silver plated, and I could not sand the crap off, so I have a single SILVER brace on the horn.

I was determined to make no compromises on this tuba, and that had made this drag on forever, nearing two years since I have played this horn. BASTA! I am moving on. If anyone is bugged by the chopped-up Olds brace, the silver King brace, or the round Allied brace: TOO DAMNED BAD. What's done is done. They all are ugly, mismatched, and very Frankentuba-looking, but they are neat, straight, and have no gaps in the solder. They are also buried within the inner branches of the bugle, probably never to be seen by anyone but moi.

So, with these final four braces installed the bugle is now rock-solid, with zero flex anywhere, as was intended by the goddess Durga, the Buddha Amitābha, and Frank W. Holton, late of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, USA.

Here are the braces I started with. What a rogue's gallery of used tuba parts…


I FUBARed the Olds brace (lower right) and had to cut the diamond-shaped feet way too small. I don't care. I will *not* remove it and look for a better brace. No! The silver abomination is directly above it. The one to the left is an original brace.


The round Allied brace was an addition. The junction between the 6th branch and the 5th valve section (originally the dogleg location) was never under any sort of load or stress. Now that it is I decided to add a brace to the end of the 6th branch to firm up that now-two-piece junction. It is awesome, too, despite it being the only round brace on the horn. (I know. Stop whining about things no one else cares about. Sorry…)


This brace is the large one between the end of the bell and the bottom of the 3rd branch. Tom Treece told me that on the 345 tubas that this one brace needed to be as heavy as possible. I have one more brace that is larger, but the flanges are too long to fit in that space, head-to-head without cutting them down. I did not feel like doing that today. However, if there is any question about this later, this brace is very easy to get to, so I could always swap them out. I don't know; probably not.



Solid!


And now, since everything on the bugle is locked down and the valve section is just about there, I hung the valves on the bugle to see whether I nailed the angles. Short answer: I did.


This tuba makes me happy just looking at it. It played very well for the most part, with a few of those "big tuba quirks" but mostly just a lot of fun. I am hoping that I did nothing to damage it. I don't think I did, but the first time I wind the thing I will be sweating it big time. My only real goals are a bit more open low register with a much quicker low F, a B natural/F# series that is somewhat better in tune, and a bit more projection in the hall. (This was the impetus to sort of Mr. Rusk's dubious "slip joint" assembly of the bugle with permanent leaks and occasionally the sound of gravel in a beer can when I moved the horn around. This bugle is really looking good now, so I have high hopes. Keep in mind that in these photos the 4th outer slide section and the 5th valve unit are not installed.

[the elephant]

Another couple of comments on the above photos: The braces are all installed in the pics. The black is not a gap but buffing dirt. I cleaned up the edges with my Dremel, and when I wiped it all down with mineral spirits I did not dig out the stuff in the cracks. Whoopsie! I'll get to that someday. But not today.

The other thing is that the last two photos were taken later using a different, older phone. I can never get the focus really sharp on that older phone. It is hit or miss. These last two were sort of misses, but they are cool shots, so I included them.

Time for an adult beverage.

[LargeTuba]

Wow! That is looking fantastic!

[the elephant]

Looking fantastic, Wade!

[bloke]

bump for amazing new pictures

[Yorkboy]

Very appropriate name for your horn:

661A43F7-8D80-40E2-91F9-ECE25B8F40BE.jpeg (30.41 KiB) Viewed 2144 times

https://davidscointravels.blog/2015/09/ ... te-nj/amp/

[the elephant]

HAHAHA!! Another tie-in. This tuba is soooooo appropriately named, now…

[the elephant]

Bad day. Long day. My blood glucose is all screwed up beause I skipped lunch, ate garbage for breakfast and am eating garbage for supper (at 9:00 pm, no less). I burned and sliced my hands seven times.

It rained all day. The humidity was 90% and it was 75º and it was raining. What a craptacular way to solder umpteen-million tiny bits of detachable braces to each other while lining up stuff that will not stay lined up because the shims keep slipping.

I had to resolder the upper 4th dogleg and the long upper 4th slide tube NINE FREAKING TIMES. It would not stay lined up. The parts were snug, but every time they would slop over in a different direction. It was only one or two millimeters each time, but it became this tail-chasing obsession to get the damned thing lined up RIGHT. (I was gonna WIN that battle, baby!)

I had to resort to temporary braces to get things firmed up before I try to mount the valves to the bugle. I now have the MTS braced to keep it aligned under the weight of the section as I brace it up. I have the 5th valve braced to two tubes to keep that all firmed up, too. Unfortunately, until I get things installed I cannot really fix everything or even use some of the braces that will eventually be in the horn.

You see, I need the horn aligned and not wobbly at all in order to fit all those fiddly detachable braces, but I need the braces to make everything non-wobbly.

That is a classic Catch 22 scenario, and that means I am out of here.

I will clean up this mess tomorrow. I will likely assemble the two long braces from the bell to the 1st and inner 4th slides, thereby freezing the valve section in place so that no further adjustment can happen without some surgery. I cannot do the outside two big braces, though, I have to get the valves on first so that I can install the outer 4th slide loop. I cannot attach the big braces to that side until I have an attachment point, and that is the outer 4th loop.

Yada, yada, yada…



I am trying to wolf down my pizza. I am tired. Both hands feel like dog meat. (I may have to have a doc look at one of the burns. I am a damned idiot.) I will come back and annotate these (or do a better job of explaining stuff TOMORROW. I am BEAT.

It is getting done, but today was a flaming bag of dog poo on my psychological front porch.

[prairieboy1]

Thank you for your posts and pictures. Tomorrow will be a better day. Take care of yourself!

[York-aholic]

@the elephant I have a couple of Holton 340 braces in a ziplock bag. I'll take a picture tonight and see if there is anything you might be able to use. I'm sorry I didn't think of it earlier (a lot earlier)!

[the elephant]

Oh! No, no, no…

I have BOXES of Holton and other old braces. I am using only new stuff except where I need somethng specific. Then I dig out th old (in this case) King braces (which is mostly what I am using as they look very close to the Holton ones and they are much stronger, using fatter rod stock.

I am using four types of detachable braces, and each has its own issues as far as fitting them to the horn properly. Some have SEVEN parts and require both soft and hard soldering to build them. They really need the two parts to be braced together to already be assembled, like you are swapping in one of these for the original brace. If you have assembly jigs like they use as the factory they are easy to set up. However, setting these up when the two tubes to be braced are not yet assembled and aligned is a real trick. It is the very definition of tedium.

I do not need anything at all. When this is finished I will still have about two dozen unused detachable braces of different sorts and several boxes of old braces. Thank you, though. Your kindness is appreciated.

[the elephant]

Today would have been much less unpleasant had I decided to approach this work like a welder. I need to learn to just barely tack stuff together and then work my way around in a circle, heating and adjusting everything one bit at a time until everything is aligned correctly. THEN I can go back and solder everything down fully.

However, the reality is that when you heat it enough to flow a tack of solder usually the whole joint is filled anyway. Perhaps it is just the welder approach and attitude I need to adopt. Line up everything. Go back and finish it all afterwards. I tend to try to get everything perfect on the first pass, and when things have to be moved a smidge it screws everything up.

Welding. I must spend more time doing it so it will affect my thinking when I solder.

Welding.

Hmm…

[York-aholic]

Oh! No, no, no…

I have BOXES of Holton and other old braces. I am using only new stuff except where I need somethng specific. Then I dig out th old (in this case) King braces (which is mostly what I am using as they look very close to the Holton ones and they are much stronger, using fatter rod stock.

I am using four types of detachable braces, and each has its own issues as far as fitting them to the horn properly. Some have SEVEN parts and require both soft and hard soldering to build them. They really need the two parts to be braced together to already be assembled, like you are swapping in one of these for the original brace. If you have assembly jigs like they use as the factory they are easy to set up. However, setting these up when the two tubes to be braced are not yet assembled and aligned is a real trick. It is the very definition of tedium.

I do not need anything at all. When this is finished I will still have about two dozen unused detachable braces of different sorts and several boxes of old braces. Thank you, though. Your kindness is appreciated.

Excellent, the box is in the mail...

Just kidding. In that case they can sit right were they have been for a while and will be for the foreseeable future.

Thank you for your detailed Holton 345 build diary!

[the elephant]

Okay, so sometimes you have to rely on trial and error, and yesterday was a bad day, so we can list some of what I got done as "error" and move on with that.

The main thing, though, is that I discovered the "tragic flaw" of my 4th valve design, as well as some stuff that soldered on yesterday that looked good, but once I dug into the whole "flaw" situation it became obvious that stuff had to be taken off, cleaned up (again) and then moved. One thing, happily, involved two tubing joints and I was able to "heat and tweak" without making any mess or creating any leaks. Nice.

My flaw was in the ratio between the two doglegs I need for the outer half of the 4th slide: they cannot work together in this context. Nope. No way. To be fair to myself, I am not really sure I could have seen this until things were more built out.

I ended up dicking around with the upper 4th slide all morning. This is the *real* 4th slide and not some dang "maintenance port" so alignment really counts, and so does the location/angle of the crook. To make things work as I have been showing them, the crook would have to be exactly coplanar with the upper 3rd slide, and a bit less than .25" behind the 3rd slide. The offset was less than half of the span of one of the crooks. As this became apparent to me I was none too pleased, since this means that moving either of them would now be rather inconvenient. The final nail in the coffin was that the lower, outer 4th would not line up with the dogleg I was using. That came off of the hoop from over on the other side of the valve set. First, I moved the hoop over a quarter of an inch. That helped. Okay, no. That made it worse. What helped was that now it was clear that to make things line up with that long, outer 4th tube AND allow that tube to be far enough away from the fat inner branches that stick out there, I needed to use a wider crook. I tried several of the 19 mm originals but none helped with the lower slide and dogleg.

The solution was what I wanted to do all along: use another Miraphone 186 lower 5th slide crook. This pushed the outer tube far out enough to allow the placement of the large detachable brace feet where then need to be AND lined up the lower slide with the dogleg.

However, the slide is now on a *very* different plane.

Anyway, there were a LOT of small issues with how I wanted to do things. (Wanted — read: looked to be the best choice though I did not actually want that setup.) The fix was to put things the way I saw them in my head weeks ago. I need to trust my judgment more, I guess.

The new upper 4th slide is together and braced up. It has been cleaned. Now I have to head back out to install the MUCH LONGER braces between the long 3rd and 4th tubes. Then the lower 4th slide can finally be attached.

When that is done I am calling it a day.

Here is a pic of my nice, wider top 4th slide.

[the elephant]

As a player, I *love* the outer 4th slide circuit.

As a designer, I *hate* the outer 4th slide circuit.

I have to work with what I have to work with. It is what it is. I will have to reserve judgment on this 4th slide until after I have done some work in the orchestra with it. Until that happens I will pretend that it looks as good as its layout is practical. I do not like how unbalanced it looks. I do not like how it seems the lower slide is in jeopardy. Perhaps that impression is due to parallax or lens effect. I do not recall it giving me that impression when I was looking it over in three-dimensional space (or would that now be four-dimensional space-time?)



A head-on shot…


A subtly different shot…


An artsy-fartsy shot…

[bloke]

Fourth circuits are always PITA wild cards.
They are just too damn long.
Most factory fourth circuit wraps suck, and those places have all the resources in the world.
…The Miraphone 98 “Siegfried”:
a true freak of nature, regarding how well those play…
Their fourth circuit appearance?
ugly as hell, and appear as though designed by a novice.
Pat yourself on the back, and proceed onward.

[the elephant]

Thank you.

[the elephant]

I needed to take some "study photos" to work out how I am going to solve the few issues I still have with the 4th circuit.

I got the info I needed and some good ideas for tomorrow. I also got some better-than-normal shots with my old-ass iPhone 4s. (My good photos come from my wife's iPhone 6 Plus.) I did not expect the focus to be usable. I just wanted to see spacing and alignment and such. However, these are sort of interesting, so I will share them, too. I'm sorry they are not as well focused, but again, I am just glad my old phone works, since my slightly-less-old 6 Plus crapped out on me last year.

Here are some additional shots. I really like the one that shows where the new 5th valve's ports show up in the "window" of the inner branches. It should be easy to build a nice slide for that valve, once all the bugs have been worked out of the rest of the tuba.

The shot that is tilted so the horn is lined up horizontally has two containers temporarily shimming the 4th slide up from where it is currently resting. This is the approximate location of all this after I cut and install the four large detachable braces. This is an important photo for me, perhaps interesting to some of you. The other ones are displaying how much room I have to reroute the inner 4th slide because I am not sure I want it where it is.

I would like to thank my jar of toothpicks and my canister of lapping compound for all their assistance in making this photo possible…


So much freaking space in places, and so tightly packed in others. Thanks, Frank! (I do a lot of automotive work, and that is one of my two huge, red, rolling tool chests. They are over six feet tall!)


I have the leadpipe rolled out of the way for something else, and forgot to put it back for this shot. It looks like it is trying to hitch a ride somewhere. (Like out of my shop and away from me!)


I like this shot. It is helping me design my 5th slide circuit as I stare at it. Remember that the 5th valve is removable separate from the removable piston valve section. This means that I can route the slide directly over the valve caps. If I need to work on them I just removed the whole 5th valve and slide, et voila! full access…


Don't forget, boys and girls: The inside of the bell is still silver plated. I did not want to risk sanding both sides. The silver is peeling in places (as it was all over the horn, which led me to remove it) but when polished up it still looks nice from the concert hall's peanut gallery.