Posted by Lee Stofer on December 05, 2002 at 08:51:39:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Clogged 20J posted by SHS Tubamaster on December 04, 2002 at 18:57:27:
Oh, everything from the normal gook, leaves and dirt to papers and candy wrappers to actual food, clothing articles, pencils and pens, mouthpieces, a full can of beer stuck in a Mirafone, a broken-off piece of a cleaning snake, shopping bags of stuff, mouthpieces, sheet music and so on. Three of my favorites from this summer were 1) the marching baritone with a bottle of Al Cass stuck in the bell crook. someone had tried to fish it out with a coat hanger which just punctured the bottle, so I had an oil-filled mess on my hands. 2) a french horn where I was using the dent eraser on some hard-to-reach dents in the bell. As I was removing the ball from inside, and moved the magnet back, I heard a small scraping noise. I worked the magnet over the bell in that area for a while, and finally extracted a nasty old screwdriver (!) that was lodged in the bell. 3) the Yamaha 321 euphonium that had response problems. I fixed all the obvious problems, and was then de-denting the main tuning slide crook when - Ping! - a penny goes flying out of the main tuning slide. Where the penny was lodged, it could turn on an axis like a throttle butterfly in a carburetor or fuel injection system, so that sometimes it would not interfere with the sound, but then it could rotate and cut-off the airflow completely. No wonder the teacher and student were going nuts!
Lee Stofer