Cringe Worthy Cerveny

[York-aholic]

I can feel my body tense up just looking at this:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/304399130802?h ... ition=3000

Great description!

[LeMark]

Somebody really didn't like that horn

wow

[humBell]

Yeah, i had spotted it too. Someone must have really wanted a piggy...

Not that i am wise on such things, but would the vertical MTS make this one of the larger models?

Surprising how much shorter a bell can be made...

[Mcordon1]

I think it's a 693, and both it and the piggy have a vertical tuning slide

[bort2.0]

Why are there bids? Can the rotors be salvaged?

[the elephant]

I would buy this and fix it up, but only if I intended to keep it for myself, as there is no way to fix this up to play well and look even halfway decent without being upside down in the end. If completely restored you might get $3500 for it. Might. And it would have to be in very decent shape, and it would have to be a good player. (Many of these are but just as many are not.)

To completely restore this would cost you at least $2000 in parts if you replace the bell and possibly some valves and tubing. The labor (if you were to hire someone) would be their hourly rate times likely 100 to 150 hours. If you repaired the bell the result is an unknown and the labor would add up to about what a new bell would cost.

If the buyer were able to source all the needed parts (new OR used) and do all work himself, it would still be a four-valved CC tuba of questionable original quality, so the end result is a total W.A.G.

If I could physically inspect the horn to get a very solid idea of everything that needs to be replaced or what can be repaired, I *might* pay $500 for that cuspidor. More likely I would tell the seller, "nice tuba" and quickly walk away.

EDIT: Upon further scrutiny of the photos, I would just walk. The modern levers and the nickel silver leadpipe tell me this is likely from the sucky era of these horns. Not a classic at all.

[the elephant]

If I was local and didn't have to pay shipping, I might bid a low amount as a parts horns. I know a couple 601 tubas that could use 5th valves

[the elephant]

The valve section and inner branches are usable if the valves do not leak… and still work…

4th is complete; only the paddle part of the lever is gone, and that can be replaced or something can be silver soldered to make it work. One has to wonder what sort of jerkoff did this damage to the horn.

I will freely admit to taking that destroyed 186 BBb parts tuba from junk to playable solely because the valve section and inner branches were in fairly good shape. The bell and outer branches were the problem parts. Once I committed to fixing the tears and holes and then doing the needed dent work it made sense to go ahead and spend the time and funds to make a working tuba.

But that was Miraphone, and getting parts, while slow, is sort of affordable and fairly easy. I do not believe this would be the case for this tuba. It would make a great restoration project for another horn of the same model with a decent bell and outer branches but a trashed valve section. But as it is I would not spend very much on it at all because of how difficult getting new (or used) parts.

[bloke]

[Insert contingencies-based comment here.]

[Three Valves]

Somebody really didn't like that horn

wow

https://youtu.be/hvXs4gp7oTk

[the elephant]

when I clicked I was expecting a different clip

"he hates these cans!!!"

[The Big Ben]

There was a used horn dealer (Taylor?) who used to sell rolled over instruments for use as wall hangers and sculptures. They looked as if they were literally rolled over with an asphalt roller. This instrument is a candidate for that treatment.

This would almost be worth buying and taking over to Dan Oberloh and asking him for an estimate. Almost. He was able to fix that rotted out 345 so I know he could do it. But why?

[the elephant]

the problem is this is a cerveny from a bad era. Even at its best, it wasn't a great instrument. (and maybe not even good)

[the elephant]

What I have always wondered about that was whether it was poorly tapered and bent parts or craptacular assembly. If the later this could be fixed by a full restoration. The question is whether there is a 601 or a Piggy that is worth taking that risk.

Hmm…

[the elephant]

Here's what I was told about the Cerveny "crap years"

In the early 90's Brook mays and other American music stores put major pressure on cerveny to triple or quadruple their output. Remember this was before the days when a Chinese instrument was a consideration, and a new cerveny BBb was less than half the cost of a 186. Brook mays were pushing them HARD to public schools here in Texas especially.

It didn't take long for quality to go out the freaking window, and just as important, I believe there was a radical change in the quality of brass they used. It seemed thinner, and more tinny. It had the resonance of a garbage can

Someone who has done dent work on a post 1992 cerveny (with the miraphone style spatulas) tell me if they theory holds water

[the elephant]

I am one of those guys who puts little stock into the material as compared with the internal quality of all the joints, and the accuracy/location of the tapers and bends.

I suspect that, if completely smoothed out, with all holes and cracks brazed shut (meaning no soft soldered, wart-like patches to cause dead spots) that this tuba would be just about as good as "classic" Cerveny tubas, with the exception of the bell. I *do* believe the material of the bell has a bearing on the tone and projection of the horn. I suspect that this bell — if given a ridiculous amount of time and effort (and I mean an amount of time that would add up to a major financial loss for the tech) — would sound pretty darn good.

My badly trashed 186 parts horn that I restored in this manner and then cut to CC is evidence of this. If the parts were well made and you restore them to the correct shape, and you very carefully reassemble the thing it will sound just fine. I am sure that my 186 started life as an excellent tuba, so this is not an unexpected result. However, my Holton 345 had a LOT of issues despite making a very fine sound. After I did the same to it everything got much better. It suffered from very poor assembly and I undid all the mess. Those 345s trickled out of the factory as a very inconsistent beast, with some of them being real dogs. I suspect that most of those tubas would respond in kind to a complete, careful rebuild if the parts were bent and trimmed up correctly at the factory.

The "bad" Piggies that I have played looked like they had good parts, but the assembly was visibly sloppy, with large gaps that were flooded with solder rather than corrected with a hammer being the thing I noted the most, and with leaks between the valves being pretty common, too. I also remember the first time I heard of taking a torch to a joint to heat up and flatten a large glob of solder to remove whatever interference it was causing was to a Piggy.

They also suffered from a bad fit between ferrules and tubes, and their tube ends were cut very badly, either crooked, too short, or with terrible burrs and "teeth" and these joints would require a ton of solder to fill them. These terrible joints would allow the bucket of solder needed to fill the gap between the ferrule and the tube, so not only did you have a potential leak, but you also had large blobby chunks of solder inside the tube.

All that can be fixed.

So if the bell can be saved by some motivated but woefully underpaid tech, the rest of the tuba is just a massive amount of work that will guarantee a loss of money — but I think it would play pretty well because that model is a winner. The issue is one of money. Is this tuba worth that sort of work to get what may be an excellent instrument that has only four valves and is in that size category? I don't think so. But I do think it would be an entertaining and educational project that would produce the most expensive Piggy of all time. And it might be a pretty decent player, too.

[LeMark]

It's not a piggy though. It's a 693 BBb

[the elephant]

That was not my point. It can be any model. If the model was a good one, that it. If not, then there is probably nothing that can be done to improve it because the design itself has flaws. The Piggy, for example, is a winning design. There are stellar examples of this design out there, along with a lot of bowsers. Those bowsers probably could mostly be improved with the thorough, money-eating work I described above.

If a horn is always bad, I blame the design, not the assembly. If it is very inconsistent then I blame the assembly and not the design.

My comments above were supposed to be about the quality of the brass used by Cerveny from 1992 on, and while thin, I think the tinniness of the tone was more a factor of accumulated errors through leaks and bad assembly practices. I think the brass was just woefully soft and thin. Perhaps they cut production steps when making bells and large branches that resulted in softer metal because it was not worked enough to harden after having been annealed when initially formed from sheet stock.

I think this tuba could play just as well as an excellent example of this model. If an excellent example of this model sucks (due to a poorly researched design) then this horn could suck in just the same ways, with few additional issues. If that model was a tuba that could sometimes be a real winner then I suspect this horn — with this bell — could end up being as good as the best of that model.

Just a working hypothesis, but it is based on having resurrected several horns in a similar condition. Maybe I will bid on this. Is this a good model or generally a dog? I have never played one. If it has actual, demonstrable potential as a design, then it might be worth it to try and snap it up for under a grand. However, this being eBay, I believe that some idiot who thinks this is a rare and valuable horn will pay $3500 for it. D'OH!

[LeMark]

I don't know much about this particular model but I know it's never caught on as much as even the piggy and 601 did. (of course the 601 had a decades head start.

If that was my horn, I would fix as much as I could with dent balls, and check the possibility of getting a new bell. If that wasn't possible, I would be tempted to use the valves as 5th valve project for my 601 (and there is another 601 local to me that could use a 5th valve too.)

Chances are someone will overpay for this, maybe even someone local enough that they don't need to pay shipping. That's how to make it economically feasible

[bloke]

this particular tuba:
wins the no bell pieces prize.
what I see:
four (if needed??) $40 used rotors, or
four (if not needed) $25 used rotors..:
… nothing in the budget for shipping

any 5mm gauge tuba/baritone/horn:
destined for destruction, if sold to a school.
“5mm sheet brass” is not synonymous with “cheap”.
The only thing crappy about Czech instruments post S-arm linkage was their replacement linkage system…of yeah: and response and intonation (all eras) offed by many of the models

Texans:
often - of the mindset that the world revolves around Texas - provincial and egocentric about most everything. That NEMC place - in New Jersey - was pushing tons of Czech junk (aka: “Olds” - along with Blessing “Olds” stencils) out their door, too. fwiw: i’m thinking that the New Jersey concern did not go bankrupt.