Last night I Googled a few things trying to come up with inspiration for a prank post for April Fool’s Day, when I came across what follows. You know what they say: Truth is stranger than fiction.
Have any of you checked out the ehow.com series on saxophones? Although I didn’t read them all, of the ones I did read, most of them were so full of silliness, that they made my eyes roll into the back of my head. While the videos might be alright, the articles—at least the 5 or 6 that I read—were clearly not written by saxophone players, or in the case of this one, a repair tech.
How to Correct a Bent Baritone Sax
By David Michael Lord, eHow Contributing Writer
1. Prepare a large, well lit area to work on, such as a table. BTW, did you know that some of the saxophone’s pieces are quite small and easy to lose?
2. Label each piece of the saxophone with masking tape before you take it off the sax. When you do take the pieces off, lay them on the table in order, and have them form the shape of your horn. This will help you reassemble it in the end.
3. Start by taking off the 4 main keys on the top, and 3 on the bottom. Unscrew the keys from their posts, and lay the keys and their corresponding posts out together. Once you’ve done that, continue taking the rest of the keys off the horn. Work your way from the largest to the smallest.
4. Using small pliers, remove the springs 1 by 1, by pulling on them firmly. You’ll want to lay them “in the apparatuses that coincide with where they are located on the horn”.
5. Now congratulate yourself. You’ve striped your bari down to just the body. Bends can occur in either the body tube or where the bell seams to the body. If your bari is bent in the body, you need to take it to the shop where they have special tools to fix it.
Now of course you’ve hooped yourself, because you took the freakin’ thing apart. You can either: A) Try and put it back together again yourself. Or B) Pack all the pieces up very carefully to make sure you don’t miss any, and take it to the shop. Then prepare yourself for a lecture from the tech on how stupid you were for doing this, and why in god’s name would you have taken the springs off? What were you thinking? Blah, blah, blah… I can hear it all now.
6. If the bend is where the bell seams to the body, you can bend it back yourself with just a few steps. Here’s how…
Sit down with a paperback book between your legs. Place the bow of the bari on the book, and hold the bell with one hand, while wrapping your other arm around the body tube. “Push and pull at the same time in opposite directions appropriate to the bend.” It’s important that you only apply a small amount of force at first, and that you use smooth movements. In other words, don’t be jerky. 😀
7. Put the saxophone back together.
Now it does need to be mentioned that saxophone repair is an art form unto itself. (Gee… Do you think?) A repair of this calibre really does require the consultation of a qualified repair tech, or you run the risk of damaging your bari beyond repair. (Heh, I’m thinking they should have put this before the article!)
So OK, I’m game. I decided to try straightening the bell on my Medusa bari. Unfortunately I got so totally frustrated trying to put all the 300+ pieces back together, and never mind the regulation that was never the same, that I lost my temper… My poor horn now looks like this….
Oh well… I guess I’ll need that repair tech after all! 😆
On a serious note, I have a horn, an alto, not a bari, that adorns my wall, that is a victim of the kind of home repair that this article outlines. The previous owner took it all apart—including the springs—and couldn’t figure out how to put it back together himself. He then took it to my friend, who’s a repair tech.
Unfortunately the sax was a MexiConn alto, and when my friend informed the owner that it would cost more to put the horn back together and fix, than it would cost to replace it, the owner got so mad he smashed it up in the middle of my friend’s shop. He then walked away and left everything behind. While all the keys, springs, rods, etc have been used, I got the body for a wall decoration.
The moral of this story is: support your local saxophone repair technician. Don’t try stupid shit at home. It’s better to pay a few dollars and let a professional do the work on your axe, than to have to pay them a whole lot more to fix your mistakes. Or even worse, have to buy a whole new sax because you tried something stupid at home.
I think that’s really the point. You had no choice in doing that work. I on the other hand, would have been hooped, because I don’t have the ability to do that kind of work at all. I would hazard a guess that most players are in the same boat I’m in. (Pardon the pun.)
The author of the article was in the military, and it is standard practice for them to learn how to take their guns apart and fix them. Because let’s face it, out in the field, you have to be able to fix your own gear. I wonder if in the military bands they weren’t given the same kind of direction. :scratch: That’s the only thing that in my mind could explain this article.
I think this whole thing could be summed up with: Don’t try this at home ❗
I can tell you weren’t in the military yourself (neither was I), and probably haven’t seen too many military-themed films. I thought everyone knew better than to call it a “gun”. Perhaps you had seen but not remembered the following sequesce (it’s been in a few movies):
This is my rifle [presenting M1]; this is my gun [grabbing crotch].
This is for fighting [presenting M1]; this is for fun [grabbing crotch].
😆 😆 You got me on both counts. I haven’t been in the military, nor do I watch any military-themed movies. However, in my defense, this comment I made about having to be able to fix your own firearms in the field, came from a friend of mine who was in the military. I wasn’t really paying that close of attention to the exact words she used. I too busy laughing my ass off when she did her best impersonation of a Drill Sargent barking orders about how there’s not going to be a tech in the field to fix their sax, so how they’re going to have to fix it themselves.
I have no qualms about disassembling a horn, but I only remove parts that are either easily recognizable, or interchangeable. For example, the point screws at the end of the long keys should all be the same. They can go in the same mint tin and it doesn’t matter which one goes where when it’s time to put everything back together. I don’t remove springs unless I already have replacements to put in their place. Even if a spring goes back in the same post it came from, it won’t go back in exactly the same direction. This means bending and tweaking… and breaking. It’s almost inevitable that a couple springs will get broken during the re-installation process. Instead, I will try to dry them off as soon as I can if doing any wet work, and take my chances with rust. I’d rather have all of them rust a tiny bit than break some and have to adjust all the rest.
I WILL remove a spring if I need to de-solder the post it’s attached to, if the heat would destroy it anyhow. Even if it breaks on re-installation SOME of the time, I can’t see how that’s any worse than wrecking it EVERY time.
I have stripped a horn down to nothing but springs on many occasions. I’ve never lost anything more significant than a point screw. What I generally DON’T do is dent/bend work. I don’t have the tools or the expertise. The one truly successful dent removal I did was when I dropped my tenor while playing on the cruise ship. The bottom bow was badly smashed, but it’s a Yamaha YTS-21 and the metal is very soft. I was able to knock the dent out by sticking a screwdriver through the low C key’s tone hole (handle first), and tapped the dent out with a borrowed hammer. It’s still a little lumpy to the touch to this day, since I never did get it professionally repaired. The reason I did it though was sheer desperation. I was on a cruise ship. Who else was going to fix it?