So after years of putzing around with these two valve sets I decided that none of my concerns mattered if a full rebuild was done, so which set of three worked best or which of the three from the sacrificial set would get used… none of that mattered. What Dave Secrist told me (when I had planned to have him do this work) was that all he needed was for the cobbled-together casing set needed to be assembled very well, preferably with silver solder. He had worked with soft soldered sets and was able to control the temps to keep them from falling apart, but he greatly disliked doing things that way. And I needed to have all the parts for the set, to include finger buttons, as he would use them at certain stages, as grab handles. They did not have to be the buttons and stems I was going to keep, but buttons and stems had to be available for him to use. If I included the "real" buttons and stems he could do some work to them, too, just like to the caps. It all depended on how much I wanted to spend. He could even replate the casings in super-thick (old school) silver for me if I wanted that.
And, of course, then he retired; I wanted too long to get to this project. So someday I will contact Dan Oberloh and set up a rebuild through him. I would prefer that, anyway, as Dan will make them look like factory new with better threads, buttons I want, correct stems, cap detailing, etc.
In the end, I decided to use my old set because for decades I had lugged these parts around with me from house to house, hoping to rescue them and add a valve. I had no attachment to the eBay set, and they had a lot of issues my original set did not have.
I putzed around with the two sets, lining up all the ports of the three valves to see how each would fit as a 4th valve. Klaus kept telling me to use the 2nd valve, but it was the really bad one. It also put both slide ports on one side, which is hard to design around for such a long slide circuit. I really wanted 1st. It was the best one, physically. It has the ports where they needed to be, and many sets I have examined have used a flipped 1st for 3rd and another 1st for 4th. Also, these are end valves, so there are only the two connecting pins. Second had pins on both sides, so there would be stumps to grind down and file/sand smooth on the outside face.
Then I realized that the offset of the through ports was really wide on these valves, so a 1st or 3rd would have the casing sticking up above the other three by about a quarter inch.
So that settled it. I used 2nd. I lopped off the two outer valves, cleaned up stuff as best I could, and then set to trying to fit them together very securely. My goal was to rescue every millimeter of knuckle and connecting pin length as I could, so both 1st and 3rd casings got destroyed in the process. What a shame! I was upset about this, but these valves were nearly useless and were not going to be used for much else (especially as they were two loose valves and not a set of two pinned together). So I gritted my teeth and fired up the Dremel tool…
