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the elephant wrote: ↑Sat Sep 17, 2022 9:18 pm

I hope I don’t look that bad hanging onto my tuba stand. And my pole attire is no so elaborate. Simplicity is often times the best.

Somehow, I don’t think I’d see anything like that on a bassoon discussion list.

bloke wrote: ↑Sat Sep 17, 2022 10:46 pm Somehow, I don’t think I’d see anything like that on a bassoon discussion list.

Bassoon is merely a pole of a different flavor.

bloke wrote: ↑Sat Sep 17, 2022 10:46 pm Somehow, I don’t think I’d see anything like that on a bassoon discussion list.

One of my best friends in college was a bassoon major -- I would absolutely expect something like that from him.

the elephant wrote: ↑Sat Sep 17, 2022 9:18 pm

Strange things going on in Mississippi...

bloke wrote: ↑Sat Sep 17, 2022 10:46 pmSomehow, I don’t think I’d see anything like that on a bassoon discussion list.

We live infinitely less sheltered lives than most bassoonists, I think.

JUST out of frame Bloke playing "Soul Man" on the 98

LOL

Back on topic…

I started the process of making a new leadpipe for this tuba. It is a mess to start with, as it is pieced together down at the valves. From the valve port, there is a short ferrule, a very short elbow, the female half of the union with its captured lock ring, the male half of the union, a short ferrule, and a short stub splice of about a half of an inch, another ferrule, then the leadpipe itself, and the receiver at the other end.

Yowch!

The leadpipe was bent just horribly at the factory. It bends about 95º to maybe 100º, so the bell hides your left eye completely. The mouthpiece is perfectly level as you hold the horn, but it is too dank tall!!! I'm about 6'2" tall and have a 30" inseam, which means I have about 150 vertebrae in my spine. (Okay, so I have the normal number, but my back is very long, so I sit very tall.) I cannot read the bottom two staves on most music unless my stand is very high. Like ridiculously high. Like people laugh at me and my freakishly high stand. Got it?

I cannot, in any way, imagine a short person playing this tuba. This is how it was set up at the factory, BTW.

WTF?

So the leadpipe was soldered into its ferrule at the valve with a massive gap, and the port of the valve was ground off a bit on one side to allow for this. otherwise, this piston set would have caused the leadpipe to hit me on my hairline! So Herr Kurath stuffed the leadpipe into the too-loose ferrule and then pulled it down to a better height. (I will try to gin up an illustration of this issue in a few minutes.)

My little elbow at the valve was an attempt to have the pipe achieve this slight bend without having a whooping big gap inside the ferrule at the 1st valve. Of course, in doing this I trimmed off too much of the leadpipe. I had wanted the union to be farther away from the pistons and, due to the original 5th lever bracket shape and location, this did not work out. So then I had to splice the removed bit back in, sans the amount excised for the little elbow. So the leadpipe has lots of little pieces down at the valve, as described above.

I did all this to prevent having to try and bend an already bent pipe. I would not have been able to curve that end with the pipe having been stupidly overwrapped behind the bell. I could not afford a new Willson 3200 leadpipe, and Herr Kurath the younger never answered my email inquiry on the price and availability of the part his father had graced this tuba with. (My negative attitude toward them started at this point.)

The leadpipe is truly a horror. I do not think the later Willson 3200 shared the Kurath leadpipe taper. It is almost 16 mm (OD) at the small end and 19 mm at the other. It is huge and has very little taper. in no way can an Allied A222 leadpipe blank be cut to the same length and have the same dimensions. It just can't. Likewise, the other Allied universal pipe is just too different to use. It is too small at the big end, and A222 is too small at the receiver and too big at the valve.

I am going to eventually buy a .740" draw ring from Ferree's to neck down the big end of the pipe I have here. I tried to burnish it and use a larger draw ring, but with the pitch in it, the thing just wants to have flat spots. I need to actually draw it through the correctly-sized ring and I ought to be good. The small end will get balled out a little to match the receiver I have. (I am also searching for a Miraphone 185 or 184 receiver, which ought to fit the pipe and allow me to keep it smaller, which is what I want, anyway. If any of you have one for sale please let me know. Not the 15 mm 186 receiver, but a 13.5 or 14 mm one. Thanks!)

So these parts were overheated when installing them because my torch tip was too small and the valve block acts as a huge heatsink. The knuckle at the valve is very short, so you have to solder directly next to the piston case. With a small tip, it is hard to keep the whole thing hot enough, and I had to do this outdoors in the winter, so the solder sort of crystalized, which is difficult to take apart later. This means that my little elbow, the two short ferrules, and the small splice all had to be destroyed to get them off the pipe and the two ends of the union.

Knowing I will have no F tuba for months now while I have a lot of F tuba work coming up made this a slow and agonizing process. I intend to try to make a leadpipe from the screwed-up one I tried to shrink down from 20 mm to 18.25 (for the small end of the union). I will have to ball out the first three full inches of the small end to get it large enough to fit my 15 mm receiver. I am fairly pissed off about this, but it needs to get done so I can play the right horn for all this upcoming work. I have done this in the past, and these annealed pipes are fairly easy to open up on the small end.

So this will get done, but I will whine and cry about it nonstop until it is finished. I have to do this *after* the pipe is cut and bent to fit the tuba and the pitch has been melted out.

In doing all this idiot work I a hoping to have a leadpipe that gives me far better ergonomics, and is smaller in its first 6" or so than the hooter I have right now. Once all that has been done I can solder the union ends to it and the valves and relocate the two detachable braces. If all this ends up working I won't waste my time or $$$ on making another one.

And I will toss the old leadpipe over the fence for the neighbor's rottweiler to play with. (JK, folks. JK.)

This was my first attempt to solve the leadpipe angle issue. It did not work.


Of course, not having a box of Willson/Kurath leadpipes in my shop, once it was cut it was cut. I had to shuffle the pieces around and ended up with this horrid monstrosity, which worked really well. It looks so weird because I added in some details to make it look less hacked together. In the process I made it look a lot worse. Oh, well. I tried.


The final elbow and union location was like this, with the lock ring not touching the stupid 5th lever bracket. I did more to accommodate that terrible part and ended up tossing it and making one from scratch.


Here you can see the overbent leadpipe. This is not a "lens effect" or some sort of illusion; this is how it was actually bent… and I hate the dang thing. I can't wait to get something on the tuba that makes the thing easier to hold and to see my music. It is so tall that to reach it I have to tilt the horn back, so the pipe runs UPHILL from my mouth, and I CANOT SEE MY FREAKING MUSIC!


I will get back to work on this after lunch today. After having to destroy some of those small parts yesterday just to save the union I was pretty burnt. And the 5th valve Conn 54J .750" union is no longer available, so I imagine this leadpipe .689" union will likely disappear soon if it is even still available.

Some days you eat the bear and some days the bear eats you. Yesterday, the bear ate me.

If I see that I have a .740” shrink ring, would you like me to mail it to you, or - if you’re interested in it but would rather I wouldn’t mail it (shipping anything is risky) - hand it off to my buddy in Greenwood…??

My set is a bunch of rings that all fit in the same handle, so I would need to include the handle. If I got it back fairly soon, I could probably get by without the handle…but a lot of times I use the rings without a handle anyway.

I am more interested in the receiver being smaller than the car tailpipe that came on the horn. I think I will go ahead and make my cuts so that the big end fits natively and then open up the small end. I have had excellent luck doing that in the past.

If I FUBAR this I'll contact you re the .740" ring. Promise. And thanks!

Here is the graphic I promised earlier showing how the leadpipe was joined to the valves from the factory. It was a disappointing discovery. So that much bend has to be incorporated into the new one, plus the additional lowering at the receiver end.

Okay, so I jumped in and made it work. It is ugly and has some compromises that might affect how it plays, but this is the best I can do with what I have here and with my current budget. This leadpipe with shipping cost me over EIGHTY DOLLARS (shipping has increased by about 50% this year) and there is a $50 order minimum. I can't just jump on the phone to get another right now. I think I can make this work and include the improvements I am looking for with (I hope) no painful acoustic penalty.

My idea in doing it this way was that to make the Allied pipe work I would have to distort the taper by using a draw ring to neck the pipe down to the necessary OD at the point where it needs to be cut, while also opening up the small end a bit (which is comparatively easy to do). So the small and large ends would both have a certain amount of cylindrical tubing. That is fine, as most leadpipes are like this to a certain extent; all the ones I have made are like this.

With that in mind, rather than having to do all that draw ring work, I could just splice in some slide tubing of the same size and save a lot of time and aggravation. Also, this could allow me to get the union out in the open (and off of the valve knuckle) where it is much easier to access. But my patch tube is nickel silver because of course it is.

Oh, well.

The bending went poorly, IMHO; there is no need to sugarcoat that fact. I have to get another pipe and do this again, now that I know what needs to be done to make the several bends. (There is more complexity to this leadpipe's shape than I am used to.) But while plodding through this today I cut off the big end too early in the process, which made the bend at that end next to impossible to do neatly. Some work with my hammers will make all the ugliness go away, but still…

The shape is not correct, but it is close enough to use. Perhaps I'll fool around with it a little more before I melt out the pitch and clean it up.

I am going to use one of my 186 receivers after all. The expansion needed to make the small end fit the receiver ended up being a lot less than I had anticipated.

It's ugly, but…

• the ends are the correct sizes
• it's the correct length
• it fits within the given space

NOT trying to hijack this wonderful thread- I thought I'd post some up-close leadpipe photos of my 3200FA-5 in case you were curious or wanted to look for any similarities, differences, etc.

Cheers!

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Yeah, I have the stock pipe, but this was a prototype horn and has some weirdness. My valves are not Willson but Nirschl, and the entry port is lower, so the pipe cannot exit straight out like yours. The way he fudged this was shown in the illustration above. I fixed that with a small elbow, but the leadpipe itself is a nightmare. I am trying to bend a new one with the taper I want, but with the shape, I need to get it around the bell without some gimmick while setting the receiver lower down the bell so normal humans can reach it.

The problem is that the pipe I ordered does not match the Kurath taper at all. Nothing sold by Allied matches it, so I am now having to create this horrible kludge just so I can plan this horn for work. (I had to destroy a ferrule and the little elbow to get them off of the union halves. The solder had crystalized and would not melt, so I peeled them off. Now I cannot use the stock pipe, even if I wanted to, as without these two parts it's a little too short.)

So thanks for the photos, but what I am making will not look much like what you have on your horn. What I have been complaining about is that I cannot make the complex bends very well due to the large one being so close to the end.

It is a massive kludge, but it is what I have to work with right now. I'll fix it later when I have the needed funds. Right now I am just trying to get my detachable hardware located on the bell where it will need to be for the final leadpipe. This one does that, and might actually work pretty well, too.

And it could very well suck. It doesn't really matter since it is temporary.

BTW, I snagged copies of your pics. I have a huge folder of 3200 pics that I have been using to winnow out the differences between the original Kurath F and his later Willson 3200 F. It has been an interesting pastime for me to do this, even if it is seriously dorky of me. HAHAHA!!! Thanks for the very clear photos!

Perfect! That's why I posted them. Happy to provide any other photos you may need or just for eye candy anytime. Excited to see how the leadpipe turns out!

I'm going to silver braze the stub tube to the end of the Allied leadpipe. I need to finish bending it as much as I can with the pitch inside, clean it out, silver braze the stub to the end, re-anneal the thing and fill it with lead, and proceed as though everything is going to plan.



"Yeah, cutting off the end of my new leadpipe too early? I meant to do that."

the elephant wrote: ↑Tue Sep 20, 2022 11:08 am I'm going to silver braze the stub tube to the end of the Allied leadpipe. I need to finish bending it as much as I can with the pitch inside, clean it out, silver braze the stub to the end, re-anneal the thing and fill it with lead, and proceed as though everything is going to plan.



"Yeah, cutting off the end of my new leadpipe too early? I meant to do that."

How does one fill a leadpipe with lead? What does your setup for that process look like?