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Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2023 4:05 pm
by DonO.
Since this horn (discussed in an earlier thread) is between 7-12 years old, had at least 2 previous owners, and most likely has never been cleaned, I decided I had better do it. Yes, I know a bath is no substitute for a professional chemical cleaning, and I will get that done one of these days, but for now I decided to do the bath. I used warm soapy water (Dawn) followed by warm water rinse. One thing that is good about this horn is that it disassembles. The leadpipe and valve section come off with the removal of 6 screws. You need 2 different sizes of Allen wrenches to accomplish this. Makes cleaning so much easier.
The main point of this post is to sing the praises of the H-W Brass Saver swabs. Many of you are probably familiar with them. They make cleaning so much easier and worry free! All plastic so no worries about scratching your horn. You get two swabs, one for valve casing and one for slides and bore tubing. Works very well indeed! Highly recommended!
After scrubbing, I dried inside tubing with a Yamaha swab, which is a large piece of microfiber cloth attached to a plastic snake. After letting everything dry, oiled up the valves with Bach synthetic oil and lubed the slides with lanolin. Everything works so much better. The valves, which were good to start with, were 2x faster after cleaning. Slides also moved much more easily. Liking the horn even more now that it’s “cleaner” than it was.
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2023 11:54 am
by Grumpikins
Sounds great. Pictures please. Im very sad kanstul closed. By all accounts ive heard, they are fantastic horns.
Sent from my SM-J327VPP using Tapatalk
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2023 10:46 am
by DonO.
- IMG_0107.jpg (98.6 KiB) Viewed 910 times
Here you go Grumpikins!
You’ll notice the three valves are in a straight line rather than being offset. I think it’s because they used the same valve sets for their upright action instruments or maybe for their marching contras.
I find it light, easy to handle, and sounds great. Plays very well with the 7B Helleberg and takes only a minimal amount of slide pulling to intonate well. Sounds big for its size.
This will definitely be my TubaChristmas horn. What else at this point, I don’t know. I just like having it because I think it’s neat.
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2023 10:59 am
by Three Valves
That is a neat tooter!
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2023 11:35 am
by Sousaswag
Neat little horn! I'd prefer that to, well, ANY 3/4 BBb available. Congratulations!
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2023 9:38 pm
by donn
Water comes out OK, without puffing and rotating and pulling slides out? That's probably the top complaint I have with mine. Your valve tubing is more consistently above the valves, so ideally water will run through the valves, but it looks to me like the drain key below the valves is one loop too far away. I don't get why that loop - why make two loops there, when there's room for a single loop parallel to the larger ones?
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2023 10:28 pm
by bloke
If fabricated of bronze (??) it won't red-rot, but - if yellow brass (and you're not going to have it chem-cleaned soon), I'd probably prop all of the slides against something in U orientation, fill them with this for a few hours, dump it back into the jug, rinse the slides with water, and put them all back in the tuba. I'd probably also soak the bottom caps, valve springs, and pistons in a bowl of the same stuff. The valve block would benefit from a multi-hour soak as well, but I dunno how you could possibly manage that with a gallon jug - maybe if you bought some rubber stoppers of the correct sizes, managed to plug up the valveset, and flooded it with this stuff (??)
Alkalines (detergents and soaps) don't harm the insides of brass instruments, but they also aren't particularly beneficial - in regards to dissolving scale.
(This stuff used to cost a buck as recently as 2020, but with 9% inflation since January 2021, it now costs two bucks (common core mathematics).
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value- ... /597763688
(I use a commercial product sold to the repair industry which only requires soaking for a few minutes, but I also buy the Walmart cleaning vinegar to clean windows and to negate contamination - hands or other skin - when I might accidentally end up with a strong alkaline substance on skin - really strong alkalines such as paint stripper, oven cleaner, etc., which make the skin feel very slippery at first and then uncomfortably rough/dry for two or three days).
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2023 7:51 am
by DonO.
donn wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 9:38 pm
Water comes out OK, without puffing and rotating and pulling slides out? That's probably the top complaint I have with mine. Your valve tubing is more consistently above the valves, so ideally water will run through the valves, but it looks to me like the drain key below the valves is one loop too far away. I don't get why that loop - why make two loops there, when there's room for a single loop parallel to the larger ones?
No water problems yet, but then again I’ve only played it 15 or 20 minutes at a time so far, maybe not enough time to make a lot of water? My King collects a lot of water and I have to do the King Dump, so maybe if that’s a problem with the Kanstul I can do the same thing?
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2023 7:53 am
by DonO.
bloke wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 10:28 pm
If fabricated of bronze (??) it won't red-rot, but - if yellow brass (and you're not going to have it chem-cleaned soon), I'd probably prop all of the slides against something in U orientation, fill them with this for a few hours, dump it back into the jug, rinse the slides with water, and put them all back in the tuba. I'd probably also soak the bottom caps, valve springs, and pistons in a bowl of the same stuff. The valve block would benefit from a multi-hour soak as well, but I dunno how you could possibly manage that with a gallon jug - maybe if you bought some rubber stoppers of the correct sizes, managed to plug up the valveset, and flooded it with this stuff (??)
Alkalines (detergents and soaps) don't harm the insides of brass instruments, but they also aren't particularly beneficial - in regards to dissolving scale.
(This stuff used to cost a buck as recently as 2020, but with 9% inflation since January 2021, it now costs two bucks (common core mathematics).
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value- ... /597763688
(I use a commercial product sold to the repair industry which only requires soaking for a few minutes, but I also buy the Walmart cleaning vinegar to clean windows and to negate contamination - hands or other skin - when I might accidentally end up with a strong alkaline substance on skin - really strong alkalines such as paint stripper, oven cleaner, etc., which make the skin feel very slippery at first and then uncomfortably rough/dry for two or three days).
Bloke, would you use it full strength or dilute? And how is cleaning vinegar any different from plain old white vinegar?
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2023 8:13 am
by arpthark
not Joe, but it looks like cleaning vinegar is at about 6% acidity while normal white vinegar is 5% acidity.
Lowe's and Home Depot also sell cleaning vinegar concentrate, which is about 30% acidity. I haven't messed with that yet. It's about $20/gal.
Lowe's also sells various sized rubber stoppers (for my store, in the same aisle as cabinet drawer pulls and things like that). I was able to find some and trim them to size and plug up the valve section of a tuba I was cleaning. I poured cleaning vinegar in, and let it sit for a number of hours, then drained and rinsed thoroughly. So, definitely doable using the stoppers Joe mentioned above. I did this outside in the summer in my backyard.
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2023 8:28 am
by bloke
Cleaning vinegar is going to take a lot longer time to remove scale than solutions used in repair shops. That vinegar super concentrate mentioned kind of pricey and frankly I'm not sure how long I would leave an instrument part in it or how hard it would be on various types of lacquer. I have to admit that I don't know how acidic my Industrial solution is, as I just mix it according to instructions, and notice when it's getting stronger and needs water added. I also put a piece of steel in my solution from time to time to attract the copper back out of my solution, but I'm offering extraneous information.
Years ago - before I had a tuba-sized tub of cleaning solution with a lid, I would use stoppers. They would tend to leak a little bit, particularly the little bitty ones that I would use to plug valve caps. It's definitely an outside job.
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2023 11:24 am
by DonO.
Well, I played a little longer today and I got the water thing figured out. There is a knuckle below the 3rd valve where water collects and no water key. You can see in the picture it dips downwards slightly. If you spin the horn once around the water ends up in the main tuning slide then you can use the water key there. I guess having a water key installed on that knuckle would solve that.
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2023 2:33 pm
by bloke
King has a place like that on the 4-valve which is solved by a water key.
The tubas which repurpose top-action valvesets as front-action (Yamaha, copies of Yamaha, Kanstul, etc.) tend to have water collection places when playing and others where water tends to pool up when those tubas are rested on their bells.
Most mouthpipe rot is not due to playing, but due to water running "down" to the mouthpipe tube when a tuba is rested on its bell.
It's really inconvenient, but flooding valve sections with (cheap) oil and (additionally) going back ten minutes AFTER playing and emptying out water (yet again - or after arriving home from a rehearsal/performance) are both good anti-red-rot strategies.
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2023 3:40 pm
by Breavdah
Three kinds of cleaning situations: "Vegetable, animal, and mineral"
Vegetable: Organic molecules (waxy to greasy stuff) Dawn works fine. Simple Green even better.
Animal: School kids have filled it with paper scraps and worse. Gotta use the physical force of mass water quantity and brushes.
Mineral: White or green deposits. Vinegar works. Regular kind. Not even full strength.
Can relate on Kanstul drainage issue! I've been playing the 5/4 and third valve floods every song. But for several hundred it has got to be the cheapest way to get a modern-playing tuba, easy responding big clean sound.
Re: Cleaning my new-to-me Kanstul
Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2023 4:23 pm
by bloke
Back when stuff on eBay went for cheap, I bought an Amati "cimbasso"-like instrument (12-foot F open bugle, but only a "bass trombone" sized bell and bore...it sucked...)
The rotors were all cemented with dried up vegetable oil.
It took FOREVER to get all that (old/dry/turned-to-cement) stuff out of there.
As just reported above, solvents didn't do a damn bit of good, since the oil wasn't petroleum based...and I didn't have anything LARGE enough to fit the valve section in to heat water any hotter than hot-water-tank water. ...so it took a LONG time...Eventually, I got it all out of there - only to find out (again) that the instrument was a p.o.s.
There's no "winning" when someone decides to try using vegetable oil as valve oil:
It's either decades old - and has turned to glue, OR it's a year-to-a-couple-years old has rotted, and smells like death.