Besson 3 valve comp

[humBell]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/175307625459

[bloke]

Valves look to be in good shape, but the least they could have done would have been to have flipped through the calendar as they took additional pictures.

[iiipopes]

Valves look to be in good shape, but the least they could have done would have been to have flipped through the calendar as they took additional pictures.

[humBell]

Another.
Houston Craigslist...

(and cheaper... not thinking hard as to how come )
https://houston.craigslist.org/msg/d/ho ... 46895.html

[bloke]

...cheaper... not thinking hard as to how come...

duh: no girlie pics

[bort2.0]

3 valve comp didn't have any bids at $500. Should I be surprised by that?

[greenbean]

Gee, I would think a person could get $650 (with shipping) worth of fun out of this horn!

[the elephant]

I like these a lot, and I don't really like comp tubas. In fact, the four-valved comp is *why* I dislike them. I hope someone here gets it and posts all 12 of the Vargas Girl pics here. (Wait, is the calendar part of the auction?) I would love to own this tuba, but alas, I have no moolah.

Wow, I sort of suck…

[the elephant]

Another.
Houston Craigslist...

(and cheaper... not thinking hard as to how come )
https://houston.craigslist.org/msg/d/ho ... 46895.html

This looks like yet another looted Katrina instrument. Hidden away in storage units for years, these still get sold off one at a time to keep those sweet beer-and-Doritos dollars flowing. They keep catching these guys with these stolen horns, all these years after the fact. It will have been seventeen years this August: how much longer will these looted horns show up on Craigslist in this part of the country? We get them in my local CL about once every other month.

Still.

Two years ago I bought a horn from a guy in Metairie, and it turned out to be a post-Katrina-looting instrument, reported stolen in October of 2005. I gave it up. I lost the money. Stolen is stolen, even if it was more than a decade ago. I am glad the horn is back where it belongs. I had the NOPD run a trace on the SN and it came up clean, then two weeks later they called me and said they have an officer who does nothing but track down looted items from schools, and it popped up on his old list from 2005. I asked where it belonged and I delivered it myself. It felt good, but it also cost me a lot of money; you do not get reimbursed in such a case. And the seller met me at a parking lot in Metairie, so no address or name.

I suspect this tuba was a school horn, and it looks to have been stored for some time. It is in the region where these horns keep popping up. I would avoid this tuba because of the very suspicious price and the school-tuba-looking damage, whether it was a product of Katrina looting or not.

It is probably just fine, but after having lost that money I tend to give a hard pass to instruments in ads like this one (super-low price, school-band-type damage, in a storage unit with no case, with a finish that says it has been untouched for a long time).

[bloke]

In spite of the fact that I like the lower physical weight of the 3-valve comp system, I’m still going to paste a 4-valve comp system onto my 3-valve comp B-flat (which features both a 24 inch recording bell and a 17 inch upright bell), because the 1-4 thing (with the 4th valve) – is a good alternate for the upper E-flat, and – though the low range false tones are great on these instruments - I tend to ride sharp when I play those pitches that way, and I’m better off playing those pitches through valves.
For what it’s worth, the pistons on my three valve compensating system look terrible, but they’re fine as far as not leaking, and - again – I’m not going to go through all this rigmarole until I completely restore that instrument, which is quite a ways down on my list… I’ll probably croak first.
I still think it’s a damn shame that this system is not prominent in American grade schools - through grade 12. (The overwhelming majority of four valve non-compensating instruments that I service each summer – even including some college used instruments – feature 4th valves that are cemented frozen with lime - from disuse) and that the only instruments built this way - anymore - are English-style baritones.