photo essay of 5th valve addition / restoration to a Cerveny 5/4 CC

[Mcordon1]

I'm sure some you will enjoy this
This is a Cerveny ACB 691 5/4 CC. Had Wally's Music in Oregon City do an overhaul and a fifth valve addition to it last year. It looks like Kevin, the tech there, posted a photo essay of the work to Reddit and imgur.

From what we can tell it was made circa 1990. I contacted the two previous owners, and Cerveny, asking if they had any more info on it's origin, hardly any is known.

There is still a BBb version that is available for purchase, probably the closest CC horn of theirs is the 696 CC.

This is the same horn listed in the York Master archive.
It's plays super well, I'm not sure if I could ever sell it. It's kinda like an uber Miraphone 188...with the new valve, pedal/low Eb and D fly out of the horn

Enjoy!

https://imgur.io/a/W8iCDMX

[bort2.0]

Wow, that's fantastic! Congratulations! That's my favorite iteration of the 5/4 Cerveny tubas. Looks GREAT!

[Tubajug]

Very nice work!

[Kctuba]

I had ordered one of these from Vince Simonetti in the summer of 1991. They got a shipment of them in and I was ready to go play test them when so got a call from Vince. The ENTIRE shipment of 691’s played basically in the key of BB…. Not CC, but almost completely down to B. If you see them now, they have very short tuning slides. I bought one about 5-6 years ago that had been left as is, and had Joe Felton here in KC cut a bit off the tubing slide and lead pipe. The horn wound up playing fantastic.

[Mcordon1]

I had ordered one of these from Vince Simonetti in the summer of 1991. They got a shipment of them in and I was ready to go play test them when so got a call from Vince. The ENTIRE shipment of 691’s played basically in the key of BB…. Not CC, but almost completely down to B. If you see them now, they have very short tuning slides. I bought one about 5-6 years ago that had been left as is, and had Joe Felton here in KC cut a bit off the tubing slide and lead pipe. The horn wound up playing fantastic.

What a mishap, sounds like an extra full 1 foot of tubing. I keep the main tuning slide ALL the way in, 100% of the time, been thinking about getting it shortened. But mine is not that low fortunately.
C2 and B1(low C and B, not pedal) do sit low, gotta lip them up, but there's a positive to it. Can play those two notes FFFF without going sharp.

[bloke]

If a tuba played REALLY well and REALLY well in-tune (in B), I might actually be interested in giving it an audition/test-play.

I have some extension (B-natural open bugle) tubes for my 5450, the resultant B-instrument plays nicely in-tune and (just for fun) I worked out "Fountains" in that configuration.