' just bought four more gallons of ultrapure lamp oil...

[bloke]

Backstage last night, I did a mouthpipe-to-main-slide back-and-forth rotors-slosh… but I remembered to go in the dressing room and grab a handful of paper towels, so I had something to absorb the 2 or 3 teaspoons of oil, and then just threw it in the trash. It’s becoming a routine for me so I’m getting better at remembering to get a wad of paper towels ahead of time.
At home, I use these things as part of the kindling for restarting the fire each morning, in the winter… Yeah: really.

It’s been about a decade since I’ve replaced the neoprene bumpers on my rotors on my F tuba. A couple of them now have a little chopped off bits of paper clips - shimming them out to the correct positions. I think it’s time to take care of my own $h!t… it’s it’s the old “cobbler and his own shoes” issue… When you know your own stuff is still going to work fine, and you know completely how to take care of it, you probably tend to let things go longer than others - who worry about their stuff, and have to have others take care of it for them.
I’m not concerned about the bumpers being old, except that they’re barely starting to create noise - because the rubber is getting so hard (oxidation).
As a combination of a picky person and an older person, extraneous noise is annoying to me.

I use lots of lamp oil, on the valves and inside the tubing. There is a downside: lots of oil going IN means lots of oil coming OUT. You have to be careful about where it is going. If you dump oil onto a dark stage floor it can be hard to see. People aren’t looking for it and it is slippery.

Hup