OH boy, this is one of the most satisfying projects I’ve gotten to do here yet. Knockpins were rad as hell, but putting together a whole key from its disparate components has been a ton a fun. I started with a Bb clarinet’s A/D ring key upper bridge, ring, and key, and a solid brass…

I think it’s wonderful that the threaded nubs inside of flute keys to hold pads in are called spuds. About half of the spuds on this flute had been threaded and the other half weren’t. How odd! I’ll be threading all of them so they can hold pads in with a washer and screw instead…

Yikes! The low F/C key and low Ab/Eb key sit on the same hinge rod, and this one is quite loose. The hinge tubes are too big for the rod, so the lateral play will cause inconsistent closure of the pad and some weird key action for the player. I fixed this by making an…

I’m so excited to work on this clarinet! It’ll be getting a full repad, but before I start with that, I want to make sure the keys are all in alignment. The alternate Bb/Eb key was looking pretty funky, so I bent it back before disassembling. I could see that it had been bent with…

This must be the scariest thing I’ve done yet! Drilling straight into a wooden clarinet body is stressful. This one is just practice, but if we imagine a crack from the C trill key’s tone hole to the tenon, we would want to insert a carbon fiber pin into the body to bring back stability…

The red rot on this trumpet’s leadpipe is pretty gnarly. This means that the zinc has separated from the copper in the brass, leaving these little spots of weak copper that will eventually cause holes or tears in the brass. Since there’s not much we can do for it at this point, I’m replacing the…

I was meant to take the lyre holder off of this trumpet slide and put it back on again, further back toward the crook. It was my second time soldering, and things didn’t go quite to plan. The slide got too warm, and the brace and crook came undone as well. Thank goodness the waterkey…

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…