So everything is done for one particular school system's Middle School and High School except the sousaphones. I finished up all the marching instruments tonight. All of the Jupiter marching instruments have these first valve spring triggers with Minibal-like (Taiwan-made) links.. what a great idea for marching instruments... triggers that rely on (basically: half of a water key) spring power - when their slides are full of lime and filth, the pistons aren't vented, and tiny little (M2X.25) screws and tiny little links which loosen and fall into the grass.
I sort of had enough parts to replace all of the missing trigger parts on all of those things by digging into my (real) German Minibal link supply, getting out my taps and dies, and cutting off pieces of 3 mm all-thread stainless steel to use as action rods....so tedious and seemingly so pointless...
... some of you have mentioned that you love doing this kind of crap. I don't mind doing it on my own instruments or on some players instrument that I know is going to make a difference in their playing, and also isn't going to be torn right back up, but screwing around with crap like this on instruments that are going to be dropped on the ground or on the pavement at least three times this year each just seems really dumb.
Most of the other makes of marching baritones and marching euphoniums feature a double stem with a platform dividing them for the felt underneath the top cap. Jupiter decided to make a one-piece tall thing out of aluminum with aluminum threads in the bottom. What a wonderful idea.
One of those things was rotted out at the bottom, but I was able to cobble together a Jupiter tuba valve stem, a Yamaha platform, and a Weril/Brazil/Dynasty top stem which I rethreaded on the bottom to 8-32. Voila. My other idea was to chop off the rotten aluminum threads, drill into the bottom of their thing, tap those same threads up into it at the bottom and screw a piece of threaded brass up in there with the same threads extending out in order to screw into the piston, but I think the thing that I improvised will actually last longer then their factory aluminum stems. Time will tell. Something else is that with their marching euphoniums they decided to use a special valve guide that isn't like the marching baritone valve guide and isn't like the sousaphone valve guide, but I was able to grind off the back ends of some Jupiter sousaphone valve guides, grind down their tips, and end up with something that works perfectly, and those alterations took about 15 seconds per guide. The most important thing is that when I encountered issues where I didn't exactly have all the pieces here, I came up with quick solutions, because this stuff has to be shoved out the door fast and it has to work... oh yeah: and neither the money nor the time to do chem-clean jobs.
A couple of their sousaphones feature the lower mouth pipe receiver braces jerked loose and the young scholars went ahead and busted all the braces that hold the main tuning slide and the first valve slide into a perfectly aligned box shape (critical alignment both of those slides to work, as they are both narrow bowed slides) so rebuilding all that tomorrow on those instruments should be joyous events.
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