So the wedding wasn’t too bad after all. The JP was 40 minutes late, which meant I had to play a lot more than I had planned (thank God for the organ Wedding Music book I happened to have with me … sight read a bunch of solo stop lines to help fill the time!) While I was playing and waiting and playing and waiting, I also happened to notice the low B’s and B-flats on my vintage soprano had quit working, and when I investigated a bit further, I noticed the solder joint on the post on the upper end of the low B/B-flat mechanism had, at some point, broken free. Damn-it! You can just see it floating above the body of my horn in the picture below.
WARNING! What you are about to see here is being attempted by a professional idiot under less than controlled circumstances. Do not try this at home!
In all seriousness, this isn’t a normal do-it-yourself repair. I spent 2 years teaching in a financially challenged public school and managed to accumulate quite a bit of repair experience — including having ample opportunity to experiment on instruments that were dumpster bound regardless of what I or a professional repair-person did to them. Even with what I know, I thought long and hard about doing this myself before undertaking the repair. The things that I took into consideration before breaking out the tool kit were:
- This is a decent instrument, but it isn’t my Selmer alto. I actually acquired it while I was at that financially challenged school for free, invested a few dollars in having it overhauled, and I’ve been having a blast with it since. If I had botched the repair, it wouldn’t have ruined the value of the instrument, and I wouldn’t have been out any more than I would have been had I taken it to the shop in the first place.
- There isn’t any lacquer left on the horn. If there was, I wouldn’t have even thought about doing this since I would have burned off a fairly large spot with my low-tech micro-torch, and I wouldn’t have a way to fix that.
- I needed my horn fixed ASAP. I perform on this instrument at least weekly, and I couldn’t be without it while it was in the shop.
- The post that broke free was in a location that allowed me to remove the key-work and have a clear shot without a really serious risk of damaging a pad or melting the solder on an adjoining post.
- Seemed like it would be a cool thing to put in the blog…
- Finally, I really need to take the horn in and have some adjustments done anyway, so I wasn’t too worried about knocking something out of adjustment or having a pad not seat when I put it back together.
So, here’s how I did the repair. Just remember, I’m not a professional repair person, so I make no promises as to this being completely right!
Step One
The solder I used for this is a low-melt point Silver solder. It melts at about 430 degrees Fahrenheit. That means, in order to successfully reattach the post, both the post itself and the attachment point had to be heated to about the melt point. Pads burn at that temperature. So, I had to take the keys around the post location off, which translated to the entire upper and lower main stacks. To get the lower stack off, the palm keys had to come off as well. That’s in addition to the low B, B-flat, and C-sharp key and the G-sharp key.
Step Two
Once the instrument was apart, I carefully cleaned the mating surfaces of both the post and the body of the instrument. During the cleaning, the goal is to remove any and all oxidation, excess old solder and and dirt, grease, oil, lint, or anything else that might compromise the solder joint. I’ve found it works best to first use some form of abrasive (I used 220 followed by 400 grit aluminum oxide sandpaper) to remove the oxidation, and then some form of solvent to remove the dust and any other residue. For this repair, I used automotive brake cleaner (somewhere, a professional repair person is screaming “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!!!”) applied to a lint-free cloth. BRAKE CLEANER DISSOLVES LACQUER! It also dissolves your skin and a few other things (paint, your vinyl flooring, your newly refinished dining room table…) but since my horn doesn’t have any lacquer any more, brake cleaner offers a distinct advantage in that it is specifically designed to dry without leaving any residue. A less destructive option would be rubbing alcohol. Acetone is another possibility, but it is also pretty rough on finishes. Nail polish remover, although primarily made from acetone, is NOT a good option because it has oil added to it.
With everything cleaned and the disassembly done, there was just one more step before soldering — flux. This is an absolutely essential step. Flux must be applied to both surfaces or the solder will not bond with the parts you are soldering. It is also a step that needs to be done very carefully. If you use too little, the joint will fail. If you use too much or apply it on too large an area, when the joint is heated, it drips and runs all over the place, and it’s very difficult to clean off once the joint has cooled.
Step Three — Solder
If you’ve done a lot of work with soldering, this is the easy step. The hardest part here was making sure the post was in exactly the right position, but that wasn’t even too difficult on this particular repair. If you haven’t done much soldering … well, first of all, you shouldn’t be doing this in the first place … but if you are anyway, the keys to getting a good joint are 1) to heat the parts up and let the parts you are soldering melt the solder — DON’T let the heat source melt the solder directly and 2) don’t try to fit the two pieces together too tightly — there needs to be a layer of solder between the two surfaces.
Once the joint has cooled, there will be some slight discoloration, similar to what you see above. Significant discoloration means the joint was overheated, the area around the repair wasn’t clean (dirt, oil, or excess flux) or the heat source (if it’s a flame-based source) wasn’t burning cleanly.
I also put the torch I used and the solder I used in this shot. They are both important! The micro-torch produces a very small (hot) flame, which allows the heat to be localized to the repair site. It burns butane, so the flame isn’t TOO hot. I actually have an oxy-MAPP torch that produces a smaller flame, but that would have been hot enough to burn right through the instrument, or at least melt the surrounding posts off. As I mentioned earlier, the solder as a Silver based solder with a relatively low melting point (for Silver, anyway). Lead and tin based solders, although easier to work with because of their lower melting point, are not strong enough for this repair. Had this post been in a location that was subject to more stress (for exampl, the palm keys), the horn would have gone to the shop where they could have used a stronger Silver solder.
Last Step — Test Fit
Before I put the entire instrument back together, I test fit the affected mechanism. In this case, I was able to then put the rest of the keys back on without re-removing the low B/B-flat keys, but it is always worth the time to test fit. I got lucky — it fit perfectly, no binding, the rod went right in.
Once that was done, it was just a matter of getting the horn reassembled. All told, took maybe an hour, most of which was the cleaning and prep combined with getting all the springs back on correctly.
