The first thing I did was to completely disassemble the horn. Be careful if you try to do this for the first time. I've done it once or twice before, and the first time took me 3 times as long to reassemble it. The purpose was to check and see if all the rods are straight, all the posts are aligned, and all the keys turn smoothly and without friction around the rod. So far, so good. Luckily there were no serious alignment issues that would require me to have to bend any part of the horn.


My next step is to level all the tone holes with tone hole files. For this, I had to borrow tone hole files from a repair tech friend as there's only so much money I want to spend on my first overhaul attempt. I referred to Curt Altarac's article on the MusicMedic.com site on how exactly to level a tone hole:

http://www.musicmedic.com/info/articles/num_6.html

Basically you just sand down each one til there is no visible leak with the leak light, then you roll up a ball of aluminum foil and polish away the burs left from the leveler.



You can see by the pictures of the pads that this horn was well past due for a repadding.



Well, that's all for now. Next post will be about replacing all the corks, swedging, and hopefully a new pad or 2.

Yours,
Bridgesax