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Any good recommendations for places that do valve overhauls along or somewhat near the gulf coast. I have a Buescher jumbo that is in desperate need of some new plating on the valves.

No idea, but I’m interested in what you find. I just moved to the gulf coast and was thinking of posting if anyone knew of a good place to take my helicon to. Need a very minor dent taken out. I’m about an hour from Pensacola and 45 minutes from Mobile.

When pistons - which are worn but still mostly cylindrical - are nickel plated, they typically end up being hourglass-shaped, because the polar characteristics of electricity attract nickel plating to the tops and bottoms of pistons. As far as the casings are concerned, casings typically wear into a V shape, whereby they don't wear as much at the bottoms as they do at the tops. Half-done valve jobs are not particularly satisfactory, and really aren't even half done. The best of the half-done ones still involve truing pistons to cylinders, and not many shops can do that, and when casings are worn into V shapes, that doesn't get addressed at all. Further, it's best to have the plating and machinery in the same building - as did Anderson. There are tons of instruments that I no longer am interested in purchasing - to restore and resell - due to the tripling and quadrupling of cost of piston valve and casing rebuilding.

I tend to suspect that - via his vast experience - Dave Secrist may have trued pistons prior to them being nickel plated and may have even tapered them down by perhaps one and a half to two thousandths of an inch - towards the tops and bottoms - prior to copper and nickel plating, but I've never discussed this with him, and I'm only guessing.

I admit to having done b.s. nickel plating jobs on pistons in the past, and I'm posting from experience, as I had to take a lot of nickel off of the ends of the pistons before they would fit back into the casings (until I finally tried buzzing a little bit of material off of each ends of the pistons before sending them off). The hourglass/polar phenomenon is really quite a thing, and it's more than just a tiny bit.