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It was a struggle, but this severely abused + no-mouthpipe/rotted-out-piston-porting Bach tuba from the 1980's (Olds O-99 tooling) is - once again - a tuba...





(I had a hunk of french horn branch that wasn't rotted, and re-bent it into tuba mouthpipe, and scrounged finger buttons, stems, caps, springs, and water keys (yeah...chrome) from the Olds GG contra scrapyard...some annealing and inertia-pulling required, to get some parts un-flattened. NO bows were removed, in the un-squashing work. I DID peel back the small side of the bottom bow guard wire about six inches, and then - after the bow was un-smashed - bent it back down in place. I also removed and reinstalled the lower #3 slide brace. I MOVED it so that the brace flange would cover up two cracks in the formerly-flattened third branch - ie. lower small bow.)

Not all repairs are “eye candy“, but are - well - “effective”.

bloke wrote: ↑Mon Aug 23, 2021 4:32 pm rotted-out-piston-porting

Porting means the little tubes in the piston, yes? How do you unrot them?

bloke wrote: ↑Mon Aug 23, 2021 4:32 pmfrench horn branch that wasn't rotted, and re-bent it into tuba mouthpipe

Impressed.

Cool to get a tuba working again :)

Some of the larger holes, I had to solder in little curved patches. The smaller ones, I just floated in silver-bearing “plumber” solder over those holes. since the surfaces are exposed - and the pistons are not going to be replated (with the surfaces otherwise being covered with plating), I decided to not use lead solder.
Some of the holes and cracks were very small, and I had to poke around with a little bitty screwdriver (and wear strong magnifying glasses) to find some of them. It took a while until I could suck on all of the ports - plugging the ones on the opposite sides with a finger - and get a suction/vacuum on all of them.

tubaing wrote: ↑Mon Aug 23, 2021 7:06 pmPorting means the little tubes in the piston, yes? How do you unrot them?

Bach cheaped out via pushpins for the water keys, instead of water key screws. One of the water keys had been changed to Olds… Actually I believe the entire number three slide was swapped out for an Olds slide… So it had an Olds water key saddle with a screw…but the main tuning slide was the original Bach, and was missing its push pin. At the very last minute, I found its push pin laying in the mouthpiece box, in the case.