Dettloff Music and Repair

One of our first projects is to make a porting tool to aid in measuring the height of the ports in piston valves, so we can use an appropriate height of felt or cork to align the ports of the valves with the openings on the valve casings. In this project I got to silver solder and buff for the first time, and also got experience doing the delicate clean-up work with jeweler’s files that will be useful when soldering woodwind keys later. Take a look at the process! We received drill rod stock, made a notch in the top for the nub, soldered together, cleaned up the solder, trimmed the nub to length, then buffed. We finished with two pieces of rubber tubing which can be adjusted to aid in measuring with the tool.