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I have a number of Olds Ultratone GG Contrabass bugle valve sections. A friend in a DCA corps gave them to me for free many years ago when they took bought eight sets of Kanstul three-piston valve sections to modernize these old piston/rotor horns. Kanstul saw a small market for these conversion kits when DCI legalized three-valved bugles, hoping these old Ultratone and Duratine horns he designed and popularized before DCI existed would get a new life as three-piston GG contras.

The bell and bottom bow are essentially an Olds O-99 tuba with a top bow that ascends all the way up to the bell flare. The bugles are the Olds standard of .656" and Zig already had the stuff to make valve sections of this size. Many corps did this to forestall the purchase of a bunch of new contras. As did the corps of my friend. And when he did the conversions he kept all the old parts for himself — and never used them. And I ended up with the guts from seven of these old horns.


So I have seven Olds-Fullerton-made pistons and rotors and tons of slide tubing, 90º elbows, as well as some crooks and a bunch of braces… all in beautiful chrome plate. Which you cannot solder to.

The issue with the rotors is that the entry and exit ports are not straight across the back of the valve, but slope downwards, making them useless to string together for a small tuba.

I have not taken out the seven pistons to see whether they can be used for anything, but they are the same quality and *look* as the O-99 (which shares the look of the Ambassador line of horns).

So, some time back I worked on hand-bending all the drooping ports and cutting them off at the length needed to provide the normal spacing between rotary valves. This took some time.

Later, playing around with this box of fun parts, I decided to wet-sand (400 grit) the chrome off after a long soak in muriatic acid. The acid eats most of the chrome off, and the sanding provides a reasonable-looking finish.

What I discovered is that Olds (or maybe Bernie Marston, who made rotors for Carl Geyer and later for F.E. Olds, but I don't know when he stopped doing this) used *very* stout brass. The knuckles are very thick, the cases are also very thick. Over this was a heavy copper strike coat, then heavy nickel plating. On top of all that, the chrome was plated.

Robust is an understatement.

Anyway, I discovered that as tough as chrome is, it sands off without too much trouble. It is the nickel that is a bear to get off. I sanded all the chrome off each valve case, down to the nickel, and left these in a box for years.

Today I cleaned up everything and cut some connecting ferrules from a stick of Miraphone nickel silver slide tubing that happily fits these valve knuckles and that I will likely use in some fashion to build a tuba using these. I worked on the ends of the knuckles with the new ferrules and assembled a nice four-rotor set from these old bugle valves. I am pleased with how it all came together. So I took someone's cast-off, FREE junk, and made something of value out of it.

Nice!

This was taken c. 20010, freshly disassembled…


Same. You can easily see how much the knuckles "droop" and how that could pose a problem stringing four of these together…


This is c. 2013 when I decided to see whether I could both cut these flat enough and bend the ends straight enough to accept a short ferrule.


Success? We shall see…


And this was today, November 8, 2022. It is by no means perfect, but I have seen some tubas with swollen price tags with less accurate work, so I'll take what I got here.






What we are left with is a heavy nickel plating that does not want to come off (unlike some brands where it rubs off like cheap mascare). The rear caps are all boogered up from pliers and they are heavily scratched up. But they still work well enough.

All the valves need a small amount of work to the actions, but none leak any worse than a new Miraphone rotary valve, and these were made in 1968 and 1969. Two of the rear bearing plates are loose and I need to fix that. These have the nifty oiler holes in both ends of the spindle. The cork plates are plastic, but Kanstul used the *exact* same one decades later, on their CR tuba rotors. I will look up the shop that bought out all the Kanstul parts to see whether they have four metal ones stashed in a box somewhere. Alternatively, I have cork plates that will fit, but the screw holes are for a different center. I can drill and tap new holes and braze the old ones shut if need be.

I have many of the parts I need to make a functioning four-rotor set if I wrap the 3rd slide like is commonly found on Melton tubas (i.e. out front to the side of 1st).

Lots of fun will come out of today's work. I needed to do this to minimize the burnout I am suffering from the never-ending Kurath F tuba "maxi-project".

Interesting!

I have a Martin Eb that at one point I envisioned making into a replica of one of the rare ones that Martin made with rotary valves.

I have one piston/rotor set from one of the Olds contras also. I was thinking to use the rotor as a fifth on a very uncommon York 18" bell Eb conversion that will use a Conn 5J (.656) valve cluster, however I may croak before I get to it...

Nice work as usual!

Nice stuff as always, Wade.

Wasn't aware you couldn't solder on chrome.

Why were old G bugles chrome plated, anyway? Economical? Doesn't tarnish like silver?

Durability. Luster. Like the grille of a '55 Chevy, these will look great forever with minimal care. They can get mud on them, be heavily rained on, or be heavily covered in dust from rehearsing in grassless fields. All you need is Windex and a paper towel and the thing looks brand new.

However, while the chrome does not tend to wear off like nickel from perspiration, when a chromed tube is dented, the plating can crack, and later de-denting work can give you a bunch of tiny razor-like edges that can put you in the ER with a major laceration.

The budget line of bugles that Olds offered was named "Duratone". It was the same set of bugles, but lacking the hard chrome finish, having brushed nickel instead. The insides of the bells were buffed so you could polish them up, as the nickel plating was pretty thick. I think the bugles in both lines received the same heavy nickel plating, and the Ultratone line had the chrome laid down on top of that. So that means that my valves, sans the chrome, are still heavily plated with nickel. Some of it is gone due to my sanding and buffing. Most of it is still there, though, despite my best efforts, and I intend to leave it alone.

The valves are very well designed and made.

Anderson stripped a couple of those (clean as a whistle) for me and it did not harm the fit of the rotors inside at all.

I might (??) be tempted to stick them individually below a four-valve valveset on a O-99–4 or a 2J.

I like those rotors, the knuckles don’t bother me, and you did a nice job with them.

I did use one – a long time ago – to make a small 4-rotary E-flat helicon into a fully chromatic instrument. That thing ended up in Hawaii, I heard the guy died, I don’t know what happened to it after that.

ref: Forrest Gump, that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

Some of my swimming pool muriatic acid did a good job dissolving the chrome. The wet sanding provided a reasonable finish to the nickel plating for long-term storage. Today I buffed the snot out of the underlying nickel trying to remove it and the copper. No joy. That nickel is adhered very well and is quite thick. So I now have this patchwork nickel-brass finish. It looks like the silver plating on one of those Getzen CB-50 tubas after about five years of hard use, heh, heh…

Now, the single pistons are another story. It looks like these can't be strung together without major work, such as removing a knuckle and installing a new one. I can do (and have done) this in the past, but it was scary stuff as I could not afford to have the case rehoned to ensure proper fit of the knuckle against the piston.

However, these valves would need to be rebuilt as a lot of the plating is gone. So in the process of that job the cases have to be rehoned anyway, so running a cutter through before this would not cost all that much more.

I have an old set of York sousaphone pistons with a matching 4th valve grafted on, and this will be rebuilt at some point, so sending in this set at the same time would be a little cheaper and would net me two sets to work with at the same time. (Actually, come to think of it, I have another set that will need this work, too. All three at once? Hmm… that is getting very pricey, but it would net me essentially brand-new sets @ 750", .687", and .656" all at once, so I would not have to mess with this type of project again for some time.



This is the best configuration I could come up with after chopping all the very long, curvy entrance and exit ports to allow these to be placed together. They are still way too far apart, though.