Bach-Bach !!! 🐔

[bloke]

It was a struggle, but this severely abused + no-mouthpipe/rotted-out-piston-porting Bach tuba from the 1980's (Olds O-99 tooling) is - once again - a tuba...





(I had a hunk of french horn branch that wasn't rotted, and re-bent it into tuba mouthpipe, and scrounged finger buttons, stems, caps, springs, and water keys (yeah...chrome) from the Olds GG contra scrapyard...some annealing and inertia-pulling required, to get some parts un-flattened. NO bows were removed, in the un-squashing work. I DID peel back the small side of the bottom bow guard wire about six inches, and then - after the bow was un-smashed - bent it back down in place. I also removed and reinstalled the lower #3 slide brace. I MOVED it so that the brace flange would cover up two cracks in the formerly-flattened third branch - ie. lower small bow.)

Not all repairs are “eye candy“, but are - well - “effective”.

[tubaing]

rotted-out-piston-porting

Porting means the little tubes in the piston, yes? How do you unrot them?

french horn branch that wasn't rotted, and re-bent it into tuba mouthpipe

Impressed.

Cool to get a tuba working again :)

[bloke]

Some of the larger holes, I had to solder in little curved patches. The smaller ones, I just floated in silver-bearing “plumber” solder over those holes. since the surfaces are exposed - and the pistons are not going to be replated (with the surfaces otherwise being covered with plating), I decided to not use lead solder.
Some of the holes and cracks were very small, and I had to poke around with a little bitty screwdriver (and wear strong magnifying glasses) to find some of them. It took a while until I could suck on all of the ports - plugging the ones on the opposite sides with a finger - and get a suction/vacuum on all of them.

Porting means the little tubes in the piston, yes? How do you unrot them?

[bloke]

Bach cheaped out via pushpins for the water keys, instead of water key screws. One of the water keys had been changed to Olds… Actually I believe the entire number three slide was swapped out for an Olds slide… So it had an Olds water key saddle with a screw…but the main tuning slide was the original Bach, and was missing its push pin. At the very last minute, I found its push pin laying in the mouthpiece box, in the case.