This week has been a good work week. I continue to take dents out of my trumpet, little by little. Up to this point all of the knuckle dents, crook dents, and bow dents have been removed. We explored using the Roth tool this week, which removes dents from bows and other tubes using barrel shape dent balls. It works quite well. All that remains for dents are the dents under the mouthpipe to bow braces that happened when the bell was knocked out of alignment. Once those are removed, all that will be left is my bell buckle.
Speaking of bell buckles, we began exploring removing them this week on our trombone bells. This is surprisingly simple for how damaged the bells look, and extremely satisfying when it is done.
We continued to build tools this week. First, we explored tapping (putting threads inside holes) on our rotor bearing plate seater. At the end of this week, we repeated a similar process when making small slide tube mandrels out of brass. This involved facing and turning the stock to size, then drilling them out and putting threads in them. A simple, but very useful tool.
In the realm of tools, we also made a nosepicker this week. This dent tool is made from ¼” rolled steel which has a thumb-shaped nub formed into each end. This tool is useful for getting at dents in longer tubes or slide knuckles. I plan to make a few more sizes of these before moving onto the woodwind class.
Finally, on an unrelated matter, a classmate had to anneal a bell this week during class. Rather than using an acetylene torch as we would for small parts, he basically hooked up a nozzle to a barbeque propane tank and cranked it open. I just thought I would share.
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