Originally Posted by
davewerden
I would think a repair for a dented slide leg would be easy and inexpensive. I'd try that route first, assuming you can get to a decent repair shop.
I'm all for doing my own fix-up on instruments, and I do a lot of that, but in this case ...
Yes, it would be easier and probably less expensive to take it to a repair shop.
In addition, if you're starting to go down a kind of cascading rabbit hole of "things that need to be fixed or tweaked" with this horn which you regard as a "stop gap", taking it to a professional repair tech will potentially save you a lot of time, money, and heartache. For example, what do you do when, after you put time and effort into fixing the ding, you then discover that one of the slide legs (probably the one that got dinged) is out of parallel with the other, or there's a bent brace screwing things up? Etc. These kinds of things are generally easy for a repair tech to do, and once it's "up on the rack", the additional cost of such minor repairs is ... uh ... minor.
The tech I go to, for example, charges $60/hour for such work, but actually charges for whatever fraction of an hour he's put into it. He did an entire slide alignment, slide bumper replacement, and some bell dent fixes on my old Olds trombone for $60. Especially if you tell the tech that what you care about is "playability" and you don't care about achieving perfection or cosmetic excellence, having him put the horn in shape will probably cost you less than trying to get any parts and the shipping involved.
Gary Merrill
Wessex EEb Bass tuba (DW 3XL or 2XL)
Mack Brass Compensating Euph (DE N106, Euph J, J9 euph)
Amati Oval Euph (DE 104, Euph J, J6 euph)
1924 Buescher 3-valve Eb tuba (with std US receiver), Kelly 25
Schiller American Heritage 7B clone bass trombone (DE LB K/K10/112/14 Lexan, Brass Ark MV50R)
1947 Olds "Standard" trombone (Olds #3)