Maintenance and Finetuning
Why Maintenance
Good maintenance will lengthen the life of your brass instrument. Most instrument owners can do basic maintenance, but sometimes a bit more is needed. A good chemical clean that gets rid of corrosion and calcium deposits is an example of maintenance that
must ideally be done by a professional. Just like a good digital valve alligment using fresh cork/felt rubbers, etc.
Rotary trumpets of the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest in for big maintenance
Service Packages
We offer service packages that will make the inside of your instrument like new again using environmental friendly products that won’t harm silver, gold or lacquer finish. We often work on period/original instruments for restorations and modifications and for that reason we are used to be extra careful not harming the finish and base materials when using any kind of chemicals. That is the same for ultrasonic treatment. We only use our ultrasonic cleaner and acids there where it is safe. Old instruments that have become brittle
over time, instruments with any form of red rot, and instruments with weak lacquer are cleaned without the use of ultrasonic equipment or acids. We use electrolytic cleaning for instruments that are more fragile. After any form of chemcleaning lacquer will be rehydrated.
We offer three basic different maintenance packages:
- basic: ultrasonic chemclean where possible plus outer surface cleanup/polish.
- more: ultrasonic chemclean, slide allignments plus outer surface cleanup/polish and removing easy to access dents (within reason).
- complete: chemclean, valve allignment, detection and correction of production mistakes, gap otimalisation, and replacing (waterkey) springs and/or corks/foam/rubber.
The pricelist can be found here!
Please feel free to contact us for any more questions!
Finetuning
We are specialized in making small but effective modifications to your instrument. We mainly use our ears and experience, supported by equipment to perform spectrum analysis, impedance analysis, endoscopic analysis, leak and pressure testing, etc.
The goal of finetuning your instrument is to optimize the performance, sound and feel of your instrument. Every instrument has different problems and characteristics and therefore needs a slightly different approach. Besides that we keep in mind who we are working for and what the instrument is mainly used for.
Examples of processes we perform are for example gap check and optimalisation, valve allignment, complete check for production mistakes and correction of them, slide allignments and in some cases even a set lf new valves and/or re-assembly or re-configuration of the instrument.
We have quite a lot of experience in doing this and about 50% of the time we work on instruments made by other builders this is what we are doing. If you have a quick look at our reviews page you can read how many players in the current professional use pur services for this kind of work on their instruments.
Important; We can do a lot to improve things, but there are limits to what can be achieved when it comes to older, lower quality or very worn instruments.
Sparkly clean / freshly alligned valves
A 70 year old heckel rotary trumpet after a full revision
Left: before clean / Right: after clean
