shoehorning in a hurry-up KING 2341 slick-out (pre-sold)

[bloke]

This buyer has been very patiently waiting their turn, but this is going to have to happen VERY fast, because I need to get RIGHT on to the Holton BB345 “twin-spin” pair of projects, as also scheduled and promised.

There won’t be many pictures, because I won’t be on this but just for a handful of days...

I'm a bit tired...but - if coffee successfully gives me a "fourth wind" - I might (??) go back out there after a bit, and see if I can rub some
Dent-B-Gon™ on the bell chimney and bottom bow.

...There's ONE set of those OLDER "indestructable" (built by true craftsmen) King cases out there, which I would LIKE to include with this instrument.
If Mrs. bloke gets to the point where all of her repair work (which has been OK'ed or school-approved) is done, I might try beg her to slick out that case (as she - via her incredible sewing/weaving/millinery skills + patience - is d@mn good at that sort of thing).

[bloke]

I thought I would go back out and work on it some more, last night...but the coffee didn’t do the trick, and (no longer being 18 years old) I conked out.
I had a lot of things I had to do today, but this afternoon I found two hours to get the most annoying part of any tuba restoration done – the bottom bow:
(I don’t know about any of the rest of you, but I try to not use wire to install caps or guard wires, unless I absolutely have to…and I used no wire to hold these in place (only my hand) when soldering them on, either. Avoiding using steel wires really speeds up the least-fun part of a tuba refurb....and - truth be told - the guard WIRE is more tedious to install than the guard CAP - due to the heat distribution tricks that must be employed.)

If I do better tonight than I did last night, I may go back out and slick out the bell “chimney“, as that’s a pretty easy part to straighten out (ie. burnish out all the horribleness, and then smooth it into a circular cone).

I MUST get this one out the door...Those Holton BB345's are SCREAMIN' at me...





I've actually also been fitting in a little bit of time do so something ELSE that I haven't been doing much of...PRACTICING.
While jacking my chops back up to where they need to be (with some sort-of-important gig-age - read: really exposed tuba stuff, over the next three weeks), I'm also reminding myself about reading sheet music and mashing the correct buttons for B-flat tuba, becoming comfortable with the long-semitone 5th valve I installed on this PARTICULAR B-flat tuba, and also reminding myself about the "blow" (through an 18-foot-long tapered bugle, which requires more focus and more buzz-accuracy than C, E-flat, or F) of a B-flat tuba. Mrs. bloke has been pretty nice about it (practicing, which doesn't actually generate dollars), because she knows that I need to do this.

[bloke]

No matter how smushed flat these bell chimneys are (as was this one), these are really easy to fix, so I’m not even sure if it should count as a significant “repaired part”...
...but I DID have enough energy to go out after dinner and knock this piece out, so here’s one less to do another day:
(TRICK: These get all scratched up when they get all dented up, but the side facing the other bows is always nearly scratch-free. If you buff out the old brace flange marks, you can turn this pretty/smooth side out, and turn the scratches in towards the other bows, hiding the scratches, rather than spending an hour buffing the crap out of the bell chimney.

[York-aholic]

That's going to look very nice when done and being a King 2341 is going to play equally as nice.

[The Big Ben]

Customer should be happy. Which is a good thing.

[bloke]

I just realized that I forgot to post the money shots, on this fix-up-and-sell project:




Mrs. bloke slicked out these Magnavox-era cases.
The o.e.m. later-era "box" cases were semi-trashed,
and this 4-valve deserves these last-forever cases.


Currently, I'm tearing down a Holton BB-345 for another customer...

(while trying - somehow - to squeeze in spend-the-last-of-the-school-year's-budget-money repairs )

[groovlow]

I love the old King BBb s
I think maybe the best mass production tuba ever
The pic of the cases gave me a smiling happy memory.
Beautiful job on both the horn and cases
Joe H
Tint

[prairieboy1]

The horn and the cases look fantastic! One lucky owner there. Great work by the bloketeam.