I might use the non-adjustable Dubro, but - when I first put them on my instrument - I was hoping to have them last (as they have) for several decades.
Knowing that even the expensive European-made metal-to-metal links eventually click, I sort of thought I would purchase the adjustable Dubro links and -every once in a long while - turn the little screw (as I sometimes do, but sometimes when I do that, I find it a minute or two later that I should have just left it alone.
)
typical bloke change of course / sidebar / stream of consciousness crap:
Most of the noise associated with rotors is vertical bearing wear.
It's possible to remedy this long-term, but only a few shops are willing to - or know to - do this. With the type of bearing plates that feature a lip, this can actually be remedied with nothing more than a fine toothed wide saxophone tone hole file. With plain cylindrical bearings like a Miraphone, it requires very basic lathe work. I can measure how much they've worn overtime with the crappiest Chinese 1/1000ths-of-an-inch dial calipers. It's not complicated: I set up the calipers on the outside of the valve casing with the bearing hammered in as far as it will go and measure the distance from the bottom of the casing to the top of the rotor stem with the rotor sitting down as far as it will sit down into the casing. Next, I take my finger and I push the rotor up as far as it will go from the bottom stem and re-measure. The difference is however much needs to be filed off of the bottom of a casing whereby the bearing plate has a lip, or buzzed off of the edge of the interior surface of a miraphone style bearing plate when it's mounted on a lathe gently... Even if no collet that fits... Because even if the jaws of the lathe swedge the bearings opening down a little bit, that is usually worn anyway and it often doesn't hurt, and if it does it barely too much, it can instantly be refit with some lava soap suds and some valve oil.
This stuff does require some precision, but precision doesn't always require fancy tools... and watching thousandths of an inch disappear doesn't require a lot more attention to detail than watching 16ths of an inch disappear when doing good carpentry work... or 64ths of an inch disappear when doing fine cabinetry work.
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