Re: Newest POS project......how fun!
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Your not alone, believe me. Anyone who has been collecting/tinkering horns for any real length of time has their own POS pile to deal with. :)
Chalk it up as good repair/restoration experience, and be glad you didn't spend a fortune on it.
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Well, I probably overpaid for it initially by $50 (I paid a hundred), but it hasn't taken much to get it working. Most of the pads were old, but not well used, so I adjusted a few of them, and replaced the octave, bis-C, and the upper-stack slave (which was problematic due to me ordering a pad 1mm too small). I used probably $10 in materials and parts at this point and about 8-10 hours of my life. It should be working by this weekend (I had it working before, but insisted on replacing a few more things). The lower octave key mechanism is dumb and didn't like to close itself without tilting the horn to the left or forcing it shut by releasing the G key (making A-C# octave jumps problematic). This was fixed by bending the octave mechanism to try to force it shut, but too far and the top vent wouldn't shut at the right time. I am still not happy with it and will try using perhaps teflon. The G# mechanism is quite unconventional, but I got it to work well. The upper stack (the bane of my hobbiest existence) is still in pieces awaiting final assembley and adjustments.
I think I will get a decent horn out of this. Intonation is spotty, but no more so than you'd expect from another horn from a similar era. The tone is quite bright! Comparing it to my Yanagisawa, it's neck tenon is quite a bit smaller, but the bell flare is of similar size, suggesting a steeper taper of the bore. The tone is consistent throughout the range and the body thick and heavy (hurrah!). The mechanisms aren't at all clunky, neither are they particularily noisy given that there's a lot of metal hitting metal. I may become enthused to use sued on the stack-bars to minimise it further.
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