Keystone Music and Repair

Here's a cute lil' tunable leadpipe I made for that cute lil' Eb cornet that tried to kill me a few weeks ago. The original removable leadpipe went missing in ages past. The owner provided pics of an original leadpipe from a similar instrument, and from that I was able to get some rough dimensions. I ordered some appropriately sized telescoping tube, mocked something up to test the intonation, then put it all together. The tuning mechanism uses some handmade posts along with the threaded rod and nut from a Bach trumpet 3rd slide stop rod.
The whole cornet is finished now (2nd pic), after I had to rebuild most of the solder joints and manufacture some new tubes and ferrules to replace originals that had split. It also got a good thorough cleaning, then another cleaning after all of that soldering. Now that it doesn't leak like a sieve and has the correct length of tubing between the mouthpiece and bell, it plays shockingly well.

Working on a one-handed saxophone, and the most harrowing part of these projects is having to braze a second post ball onto this post. The heat required to braze the ball is easily enough to release the solder that holds the post onto the body of the instrument. I got around that by working quickly (which minimizes the amount of heat that can transfer through the post to the body) and by stuffing a wet cloth into the body right under the post. The water in the cloth (in this case, a sock) can absorb a lot of heat, which keeps the body (and the solder joint) below the temperature at which the solder would flow.

I place a scrap piece of steel rod through the post to keep it aligned (just in case the joint were to come loose) and align the post ball with a piece of brass rod that's threaded on both ends. This picture shows how it looks after a lot of clean up and lacquering.