The Band Tech Chronicles

 This last week we learned the proper way to remove dents with a simple flute mandrel and Delerin plastic hammer.  This is the sharp dent before I worked on it. A "sharp" dent has a definite valley at the bottom and a “dish” dent does not. For example, a sharp dent would be from hitting the edge of a table and a dish dent would be from a rounded hammer.  This is the sharp dent after I worked on it. The process to remove these dents consisted of placing the body of the flute on the flute mandrel, the mandrel is a steel rod machined to specificaly fit a flute, and hit the high spots of the dent, mostly around all sides of the dent, to bring it to the origional shape. You will still see a mark from the origional dent but the body will be back to its rounded shape.  I had a struggle with these dents at first, especially these sharp dents, but with some practice I felt more comfortable and confident with the hammer. 

 I finished my work early this day and my professor found this odd clarinet for me to mess with.  This clarinet is a Bundy Mazzeo style, and what makes it odd is all the extra levers on it.  A typical clarinet has a single straightforward key for the Bb trill key (as pictured above left ) but the Mazzeo clarinet has multiple extra levers. (pictured right) The supposed purpose for these extra levers is to help with the tone of the throat keys, (that is what the upper keys are called. The register, Bb trill, C trill, A, and Ab) as well as improved technical fluency, and more accurate intonation.  This clarinet my professor showed me was not in functioning condition, and he wanted me to figure out how it worked and fix what needed fixing or replacing.  I won't bore you with too many technical details but this horn needed some new cork, a bit of bending, some pad leveling and a new super duper tiny spring.  One super cool mechanism on this clarinet was this lit...

 In this quarter we have 2 project instruments. First a clarinet and then a flute.  This is my clarinet before I had cleaned or fixed anything on it. I forgot to take a complete before picture but in this one I have not cleaned anything, I just took the keys off.  The first thing I did was take out all the old pads and remove the old corks. Then it was time for the degreaser and pickle for the keys.  The degreaser is a vat of purple chemicals that cleans the part before you put it in the acid, and the pickle is a vat of an orange acid called phosphoric acid. I forgot to take a picture of the keys in the pickle but pictured right is what the pickle looks like.  With the keys cleaned it was time to buff them. Since they were nickel plated I only buffed them using the yellow compound. (Middle ground for buffing compounds, white, yellow, green) With the keys cleaned I started on the body of the clarinet. My clarinet was wood so cleaning was a bit different that a pl...

 This tool was the first thing we made on a lathe. Its purpose is to help seat a rotary valve so it is level.          It was fairly easy, I just had to face both ends. Facing is when you use the cutter to make an end perfectly flat with no old marks on it. After facing I marked the center of the stock with a center drill bit and drilled a hole with a huge drill bit. After the hole was drilled I deflashed the edges getting rid of the sharp edges.  This is an after picture, I am very happy with how this came out. 

 For this subject I was tasked with replacing the low E/B key pad.  This is the before. The key was not too worn but the fishskin (super thin dried cow intestine) that was drawn over the pad was starting to tear.  First I used the acetelene torch to heat up the pad cup and take out the pad. I also used some q-tips to get any remaining glue off of the cup as to start with a clean surface. The cup was fairly smooth on the inside so I took my screwdriver and roughed it up so that the glue had a better surface to stick to.  Then I applied the glue to the new pad, covering about 50% of the pad with glue, heated up the pad cup and stuck the new pad in the cup. I then used my pad slick to level the pad as best I could.            Finaly it was time to put the key back and check and adjust the seal of the pad over the tone hole. This key was pretty good but I still had to heat it up and angle it forward just a bit. Then it was done!