Week 32 - April 23rd - 27th

With saxophones done, we move onto oboes in the woodwind lab. We begin as always by making a screw board for disassembly, and tear it apart. We went through and began to examine all of the mechanisms that are unique to the oboe. The wonderful thing about woodwinds is that once you begin to understand the mechanics of one, they all begin make sense. All of the basic systems are the same or similar and we deal with them in the same way.

We also began corking oboes this week. Oboes are one of the few instruments with cork pads. Unlike bladder pads, cork does not bend around distortions and leaks in the tone-holes. We check with a feeler gauge that is 0.0005" thick and adjust to tolerances within that. So to ensure we have a good seal, we must first prep the tone-holes so they are perfectly level. We then bevel and face the pad to seal properly in the key. If the pad protrusion is correct, the key seals pretty easily.

We revisited our clarinet tenon sleeve this week. To finish this off, we first chucked our first tenon in the lathe as if it was a real clarinet, leaving the cork on and all of the posts. We then faced off what would be the damaged tenon and sized it to receive a sleeve. To make the sleeve, we drilled out a piece of 1" ABS with a 3/4" drill. After fine tuning the inside to accept the tenon, we turned the outside down to size and cut a cork groove. Once we cut it off, it was ready to be glued on. We did not glue these particular ones on, but if we did we would then face off the excess sleeve in a lathe and create a pretty good tenon replica.

 We began experimenting with crack pinning this week. Though we did not have a bunch of cracked tenons, we put a big scratch in some junky clarinet bodies and pretended. To begin, we drilled holes in the body underneath the crack at varying angles. The hole must not go into the bore of the instrument or pop out of the body on the other side. Once the holes are drilled, we burn heat threaded rod and burn thread it into the body, snapping it off at a break point once we are at depth. We then grind the excess rod off with a grinding wheel.

After this, the crack is pinned and should not open again. This does not close the crack, it only holds a crack that you have already closed. Now comes the artsy part. Using super glue and grenadilla dust, we fill the holes and cracks in the body and file it flush. Using a varying degree of files, sand paper, and buffing compounds, we can blend these patches in so that they are invisible to the untrained eye. I will revisit this project next week as I continue to blend in the patches.

Finally, we got some bassoons to take home over the weekend. This is the last instrument we will discuss in class as next week is our last. We have already made screw-boards for them, so this weekend is all about tearing them down and putting them back together, checking out the regulation and mechanics along the way.

Week 31 - April 16th - 20th

This week has been a really good work week for us in the woodwind lab. We are still working on our project saxophones and they are due on Monday. So to start this week, I went through and leveled tone-holes. We do this by using a flat bit with a diamond stone paper on it to remove material from the tone-hole. Once they are all perfectly level, the pads are much easier to seal.

After the tone-holes were leveled, I glued in all of the pads and began leveling them. The pad cups were already leveled during the key fitting process, so padding was pretty easy for the most part. Instead of using a feeler gauge, we use leak lights on saxophone to determine if and where the pad is leaking.

 After the padding was completed, I went ahead and glued up a bunch of cork for feet and articulations. Contact cement needs to cure for at least 15 min per coat, so while the glue was setting up, I straightened the neck and removed the few dents that were in there. With all of the corks glued on, I began the regulation process.

The last thing I did this week was to replace the neck cork. Much like tenon corks, we bevel and soften the cork before gluing it on. Once in place, the cork is shaped and sized for the mouth piece. The difficult thing about it is that the neck is tapered and we want a cylindrical cork. Once in the proper shape, the cork is sealed with paraffin wax and cork grease. 

On a final note, according to spectators our Pine Car did not lose any of the match-ups this weekend. After all of the total times were added up, our car placed 4th overall. Next week we finish our saxophones and begin work on oboes.

Week 30 - April 9th - 13th

We got hold of our project saxophones this week. I began working on a Bundy II. The horn wasn't in terrible condition, most of the keys moved and there were only a few dents. However, the Bundy II is notorious for having posts misaligned straight from the factory, so it is going to be a lot of work.

I began by inspecting the horn for damage and fixing any key issues that I could before actually tearing the horn down. During this, I documented things like cork thickness, materials and pad protrusion. After that, it was stripped of all its corks and pads and into the chem flush. While the keys horn was soaking in detergent, I began straightening and polishing all of the hinge rods, a very tricky task with hinge rods this long. If you do not hold them right, the centrifugal force of 1725 rpm will slap you right in the face.

After the horn was clean, I began body work. The first thing was to straighten the body. Luckily, my body was not out of alignment. Using barrel and spherical dent balls, I went after dents in the bow and body. Now that it is dent free, we begin the daunting task of Bundy II post alignment.

 Post alignment involves a few different things. The posts themselves have to be aligned on all three axes. In addition, the holes themselves point in a specific direction from when they were cut, and this direction is often wrong on Bundy II's. I began with the lower stack and found that one post was so twisted that I had to unsolder it from the body. Once the other posts were lined up, I used the E key and the hinge rod to line the post up and soldered it back. Overall, I found that more than half of the keys had misaligned posts that had to be corrected, and a couple of them had to be adjusted to work with twisted posts. 

 Continuing with body work, one of the flanges holding on the B-Bb key guard had a broken solder joint. Fixing this was relatively easy. Once the joint was cleaned up I reattached the key guard and used it as the fixture to hold the flange in the proper position. I soldered it in place and cleaned up the joint.

 Now with the posts aligned and the body work totally finished, I began key fitting. Surprisingly, there wasn't a lot of play in the keys on this sax, so key fitting went relatively easy. The post that I soldered back on in the lower joint caused a slight binding issue because I butted it up to the E key a little too close when reattaching. A couple of keys needed to be adjusted because of the post alignments, but overall it wasn't too bad.

The next step is going to be the leveling of the tone holes. To do this, we will use a drill and a fine leveling disk to actually sand the high spots in the tone hole down, and a dent rod to push the low spots up. I've run out of time this week, so to prepare I used a Sharpie to color the tops of the tone holes black so that I can see the point of level when sanding. To finish off the week, I epoxied the thumb button back on the body and will let it set up for the weekend.

 The NAPBIRT conference is this weekend in Normal Illinois and though most of us cannot make it, we did send an entry for their Pine Car Derby. My job on this car was to design and construct the front end of the car. So, using a lyre as the front end, I soldered a couple of sax posts to a piece of square stock and attached it to the car. The wheels were drilled out and attached to a piece of cut drill rod that was screwed into an adjustment nut. Overall, it worked pretty well. After that, the other classmates finished construction and we all decorated it, as terribly as possible.