seemingly impossible challenges become self-amusement

[bloke]

I've been working on (two or three left to go - hopefully, I'm past the worst) roughly a dozen (not only professional and close-to-professional grade trombones, but also) silver plated and F-attachment instruments for a school. These are all taken outdoors, and several of their slides were "creamed".

It should go without saying that I can - fairly quickly/easily - fix all the junk wrong with their bell sections (including realignment main tuning slides - after un-smashing their bows, straightening out bells, replacing missing thumb linkage parts, etc.), but - regarding the playing slides - since the tubes are silver plated, they're all going right back out to do more outdoor war, these instruments are made in the USA, the manufacturer - these days, supplying parts - is as slow as molasses (going to remain in business...??), I've been entertaining myself repairing playing slide tubes that - under normal circumstances - I would be throwing in the trash (particularly if repairing for pros), and - actually - these slides are turning out so very "good enough" that some of them are actually prompting me (upon completion) to giggle, just a little bit.

I'm employing some crazy techniques (and some of my techniques aren't used by very many - if any - others anyway) that have never occurred to me before to try, and several of them are proving to be 95%-or-better successful. One thing - that I tried...and it worked, employed using a vice (and not just to support a repair tool).

[Mary Ann]

Well, I suppose if you use the vice to make the diameter small enough that it doesn't scrape when in use, that's good enough for kids to use outdoors.

[bloke]

I'm having to hurry through this stuff, so I didn't have time to experiment to see how close to perfectly round I could get a damaged area of a slide tube, but I managed to get an area - that was horribly oval - down to the point that it only varied about .003" as I ran the calipers around the tube, and that's just from squeezing it crudely with a no-teeth vise, but trying to be a good guesser.

[Mary Ann]

That sounds like something I would resort to if I just HAD to get a slide to work. Hilarious really -- you should disguise yourself and make a youtube video. The screeching would be off the scale.
I have a bass tbone that I sold and rebought later (sound familiar?) and it came back with a slightly crunchy slide past about 4th position. But I don't think I'll put it in a vice. I can't hold it up and would rather re-sell it, but with the 7 out of 10 slide, it would have to go cheap.

[bloke]

When I'm repairing really messed up slides, I either take them completely apart - to isolate the four tubes, or I'll at least take off one tube and isolate it. I put them on a very slow-turning lathe, so I can see where they're a bent, and if they happen to be out of round/ovalled, the lathe shows that up very clearly as well. I wasn't guessing as to where it was oval, but I was guessing whether the crazy technique to make it round again would work. Human fingers - at least mine, which I consider strong - aren't strong enough to squeeze chrome-plated nickel-silver inside slide tubes back round again, but a vice seems to be strong enough.

I read where a lot of people place playing slide tubes against really straight flat surfaces and look at the light and blah blah blah... maybe that's completely revealing to them, but - to me - there's nothing that shows up flaws in playing slide tubes more than just sticking them on a lathe and letting them spin slowly. Fortunately, most of them are only crooked and not ovaled. I find the centers of the wobbles, mark them with a sharpie or a crayon, release tension on the tube from the lathe, address the wobble, spin the tube again, and determine whether I've done just enough, not done enough, or done a bit too much. I quit working on them when they look like they're sitting still while they are spinning. Prior to mounting them on the lathe and straightening them, I remove any dents that might be in them. This requires some experience, because it's really easy to bulge or oval a playing slide tube when removing dents from them. Bad bulges behave in the same way that oval places behave, except there's no hope in fixing a bad bulge.