Today is beat the crap out of another bottom bow day.
Posted: Thu Sep 21, 2023 6:20 am
Schools are still sending instruments in at this late date. I'm halfway through a set of four, and the next one on the list is one of those little bitty Besson tubas - that date back to the '80s - with the bottom bow all smashed in. Mrs bloke beats on a curved rod with a bullet shaped ball on the end, and the rebound knocks the dent out. Afterwards, I go back and smooth everything out the best I can, even though it's two layers of metal.
Yesterday, I sent a pair of newish #1 20K short action pistons off to Dan Oberloh which seem to have been manufactured poorly and wouldn't go up and down in their casings. The tops of each of them look to be bulged out about 2,000ths on one side, and the factory remedy was apparently to buff all of the plating off of the tops and bottoms of each of those Pistons and some off the middles of them as well as attempts to get the pistons to go up and down in the casings before shipping them out to the store that bought them. Before buying these, I tried to hint to the band director that they would be much happier with JP sousaphones, but I suspect that - since they cost about 1/3 the price - they decided that they couldn't possibly be any good. Something tells me that these aren't the only two pistons - out of all those 20K purchases - which are going to have to be sent to Dan.
Another school ordered a stack of repadded alto saxophones from us. The shutdown, government spending, and subsequent hyperinflation have defined that people just aren't buying or renting those (as alto saxophones are more expensive than other things - particularly when rented from super-high-prices stores that go into schools and do "rental night") when their kids are chosen to play them, so schools are buying a bunch of them to issue to students. Mrs bloke has already set up an assembly line again. A week or two ago, she shipped off two to a longtime tuba discussion list member - who is also/mostly a bassist and is a band director up in Baltimore. These are not the only batches of saxophones we have sold to schools recently.
Yesterday, I sent a pair of newish #1 20K short action pistons off to Dan Oberloh which seem to have been manufactured poorly and wouldn't go up and down in their casings. The tops of each of them look to be bulged out about 2,000ths on one side, and the factory remedy was apparently to buff all of the plating off of the tops and bottoms of each of those Pistons and some off the middles of them as well as attempts to get the pistons to go up and down in the casings before shipping them out to the store that bought them. Before buying these, I tried to hint to the band director that they would be much happier with JP sousaphones, but I suspect that - since they cost about 1/3 the price - they decided that they couldn't possibly be any good. Something tells me that these aren't the only two pistons - out of all those 20K purchases - which are going to have to be sent to Dan.
Another school ordered a stack of repadded alto saxophones from us. The shutdown, government spending, and subsequent hyperinflation have defined that people just aren't buying or renting those (as alto saxophones are more expensive than other things - particularly when rented from super-high-prices stores that go into schools and do "rental night") when their kids are chosen to play them, so schools are buying a bunch of them to issue to students. Mrs bloke has already set up an assembly line again. A week or two ago, she shipped off two to a longtime tuba discussion list member - who is also/mostly a bassist and is a band director up in Baltimore. These are not the only batches of saxophones we have sold to schools recently.
