Any system that employs jamming dent balls down through something with a flexible cable (that's longer than a few inches long) is asking for a big boo boo, unless someone has a tremendous amount of experience and a really good touch.
I do a lot of > pulling < (or magnet coaxing, or even driving) dent balls down through things, but I don't jam them down through all that much - if I can help it. Also, more and more I'm doing "spot annealing", and - if I'm annealing a place on an instrument that is near a lead soldered brace, I might take some small gauge solf steel wire (and I'm talking small enough to greatly the chance of putting little crease lines in the tubing with the wire itself) and hold the brace together so that it doesn't come apart due to a nearby area being heated red hot. My methods are often not traditional, and I do a whole bunch of stuff without taking things off of instruments.
I was working in some tight spots last night, but I got some really awkwardly positioned dents removed from that lower curly-cue 5th branch of a 186 - while leaving that part on instrument (as removing that part is a nightmare and if that's taken off the instrument, the entire instrument might as well be completely unsoldered). I also did a really nice job on another one of those fourth rotor to main slide "upside-down question-mark-shaped connectors. I did remove that from the instrument, but that's awfully easy to remove and reinstall, but also use some pretty non-traditional methods to repair that part... I have used a > very short < flexible driver to repair that part in the past (when completely flattened), but I didn't use anything like that on this one - even though it was heavily dented.
The odd techniques outlined above are usually off the table if an instrument has a really pretty lacquered finish or an intact silver one... of course, when somebody smashes up a really pretty instrument and expects me to straighten it back out, I'm going to do whatever I have to do to do it the best I can do it.
That was a lot of rhetoric, but the main point should be that - if you use some big long flexible thing to jam balls down into instruments - regardless of whether the ball screws on the end or is held on the end by a cable, it's really really easy to mess up instruments with those sorts of things.
Thanks. So far I have just been using the barrels themselves, drivers, and dent hammers. Haven't been brave enough to use either of the long tools yet.
These users thanked the author arpthark for the post:
