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If you have slides ugly blackish splotchy staining on them (I am assuming this is totally cosmetic), what can you do to improve the appearance? I know there is something that can be done, because when I sent a different horn to our local shop for chemical clean, the slides came back shiny-new looking. What they did, I’m not sure. Did they just soak them in the same chemical cleaner? Buff them on the wheel? Something else? I just don’t know.

Rather than sending the horn for chemical cleaning to the tune of $200 or so, is there something simple I could do? Not looking for brand new looking necessarily, but just improve the look (and maybe function?). Here are some products I was considering to do a hand polish: vinegar and salt, toothpaste, Flitz. Would any of these hurt anything? Would they help? Or should I just give up and pay for the chemical clean? Or just leave them alone and let them be functional but ugly?

There's no green stuff on them and it's just very dark tarnish on nickel silver or brass - particularly if a slide slides smoothly, you might consider leaving it.

I guess what I'm saying is if it's a thin coating of smooth-sliding patina, it's just going to eventually re-form, if it is removed. Shining up slides over and over again many many times will eventually make them a little bit looser, just like shining up silver plating over and over again and again will eventually cause the thin silver plating to be taken down to the brass base metal.

The nickel silver inside slide tubing on my big Miraphone has black patina on the ends several of of the tubes, but they slide like glass, and I'm not the least bit interested in removing that from the ends of those tubes...

In contrast, I just brought an old Czechoslovakian tuba "back from the dead" to sell to a church, and the nickel silver inside slides on it were coated with old grease that had sort of turned to cement, those tubes had some green areas on them, and there was even some lacquer on the tubes, because the factory lacquering job was careless. I took those five slides into the buffing room and just quickly buffed off all that mess, wiped them off with a solvent, and put fresh grease on them. But those slides have been sitting for decades, and - honest to goodness - needed cleaning.