I just don't like taking that one particular instrument out because it's so large and fragile. I've had it out in the shop before, but carrying it in there, moving a bunch of stuff out of the way due to its size and all that.. I have that Wenger tuba stand in my tuba room that I could use to work on the instrument when the bell needed to be up, and I had that marble counter in the kitchen to work on the instrument when the bell needed to be down, so...
To get the lacquer off, I used some fairly coarse cloth-backed sandpaper little pieces of it - torn off of a narrow roll, a sanding stick - seen in the picture - which features a tension spring and a thin band of sandpaper, and also used a three-cornered solder scraper to simply scratch lacquer away in some of the tight places, and maybe edges.
no fibbing:
Neither of those two adjacent mouthpipe-attaching flanges fell off the instrument, not even once.
the picture with me holding the cheaters:
I put those on when I began sanding. I actually found two identically-shaped pair yesterday morning at a thrift store (where I also found a good fitting black suit coat, along with the perfect shape and height replacement carafe for our Cuisinart coffee maker)...one pair being the black ones in the picture, and the other being some whatever those shell-looking brown colored ones are called. Up close - such as maybe 15 inches away - oddly those two pair of $2 used cheaters are nearly perfect for my up-close vision. The left lens does very little, as my left eye focuses pretty darn well up close, and the right lens seems to be just right for eliminating my double vision in that eye, up close. They are no good for gigs, because I need those to focus at least another foot or more away... I promise - someday soon - I'm going to get some actual eyewear and cataract evaluation, but - right now - other things take precedence.
Stopping to take these pictures was pretty difficult for me - because doing that was a distraction, and - whenever I'm working on instruments - I'm always concentrating on driving towards completion of whatever the project is, whether it be large or small. You probably have noticed that I typically post very few pictures taken "in progress".
