I am not going to write today!  Watch the video!

We practices corking all morning (notice the pile of cork on my bench, and all of the used razor blades).  I am already getting much better at it!  This afternoon we learned more about regulation. There are two points of regulation on the clarinet (meaning 2 or more pads closing from one point of action).  We learned how to bend touch pieces and the bridge to get the right pads to close exactly together.

Woodwind class started this week.  We are going to start with the clarinet.  We have learned to identify regulation, venting, and lost motion.  It was a short week, so we ended wednesday by making clarinet screw boards, and assembling and disassembling the clarinet.  We will learn more about corking, regulating, and venting the clarinet this week!

Brass class ended well. I spent the rest of the week working on a trumpet that belongs to one of the lunch ladies at school! It is a King 601. It had stuck slides, stuck valve caps, red rot in the mouth pipe, and dents that needed to be removed. I unstuck everything except for the main & second tuning slides and then chem flushed it. After three days with penetrating oil the slides still had not moved so I cleaned the trumpet in the ultrasonic cleaner. After the cleaning, more penetration oil, and some pulling tools I got both slides unstuck. I had to replace the mouth pipe because the red rot was so bad. I used a silver plated mouth pipe that was an extra in the shop in order to save her some money. The king outer tuning slide did not go on that pipe as far as the pipe's original one, so I had to spot plate it. It was so neat!!!! I'm not finished with the project, but I will work on it when I return to brass class!

This is the start to my last week in brass class this semester.  I am anxious to start woodwinds.  I am done with my projects, so I just have some dent tests to do this week.  Hopefully I can get in a few more projects for extra credit as well.  Today I soldered the water key bridge back on to a chrome plated bugle!  The soldering went well.  I then replaced the water key cork and spring.  I may do some dent work on it tomorrow, or maybe I will be able to start a different project!

I finished building my mouth pipe today.  It took a lot of work to get the solder joint just right.  I had to start over on the the upper outer slide tube side because my shimming slipped out a little bit.

I also modified the bearing seater tool that I made early in the semester.  We threaded it and added a bolt, just like we have on our slide tube dent tool.

I finished my project trumpet today!!!!!  The dents are out, it is greased, ported, and ready to go!!!  I am now working on a replacing a mouth pipe, just for practice.  I unsoldered the mouthpiece receiver and the upper outer slide tube, and then scraped the excess solder from the pieces I was going to reuse.  I cut the new mouth pipe to size with a tube cutter, cut buffed them with tripoli, degreased them, and fitted the parts with shimming.  I will solder it tomorrow.

I worked on my project trumpet again today.  Most of my day consisted of me trying to get the dents out of my main tuning slide crook.  It was dented from both sides.  I didn't get very far with dent balls, so I had to unsolder one of the slide tubes.  Then I used dent rods, draw plates, tapping and burnishing to try to remove the dents.  I did what I could, but it doesn't look perfect.  I was ready to solder everything back together, but it didn't fit together right.  I had to sand one end of the crook.  (This makes more sense if you look at the picture).  I finished the day by soldering my slide tube back on the crook.  You can see more pictures of this process in my "Project Trumpet" page.

On Friday I spent all day doing dent work on my project trumpet.  It is actually shaped like a trumpet now!  Today I continued on the dent work and I lacquered my mouth pipe project.  We also learned about replacing mouth pipes today even thought we don't have to do this.

A BIT ABOUT MOUTH PIPE REPLACEMENT

It is important when you take the mouthpiece receiver and the upper outer main tuning slide tube off that you keep them in good condition because you will reuse them.  Solder must be completely scraped out of these parts before you try to fit them to the new mouth pipe.  You can use the old mouth pipe for measurements so it is good to keep that around too.  If you replace an old mouth pipe with a universal one, you should use a tube cutter & cut it to the size of the original mouth pipe.  You must use dent balls to make the parts fit tightly.  You can also use brass shimming to fill in big gaps between parts.  Everything must be exactly straight before you solder.

Besides doing dent work on my project trumpet, I have been preparing my mouth pipe soldering project for lacquering.  I hand & wheel cut buffed the areas where I had burned the lacquer.  I used white lime on the wheel and tripoli on wicking to hand buff.  Then I removed the cut buffing compound by degreasing the horn.  Next I hand & wheel color buffed with red rouge.  I was careful not to touch the horn while degreasing and taking it to the lacquer room, because I don't want to lacquer over a fingerprint.  I didn't have time to lacquer it today, so it is wrapped in cloth to prevent the air from discoloring it.