Valve racket

[Bassboner]

I have an Olds O99, 3 banger, sort of new to me. I'm a bone player, so no discernable valve skills. I find the valves can be a little loud. Do I just learn how to not mash the valves, or is there some felt or neoprene or urethane donuts I can put in there so I sound less like I have my own percussion section? Can you point me to a site, vendor, sizes, part number, etc? I'm just a bone player so you gotta make it easy.

[bloke]

- new soft felts of the correct thicknesses

- be certain that the caps and buttons are snugged down

- Often (with instruments this old) valve stem threads are loose and will not snug up. Check those.

- replace the metal valve guides with nylon (SAE 3-48 thread)
>>> Buy these https://www.ebay.com/itm/325556518135 (or cheaper, if you can find them cheaper somewhere else), and cut the heads down to the thin rectangular shape of a valve guide...or have someone else cut them down for you. Of course, you'll cut down the thread length short as well.

ROUGHLY 1/8" thick felts (both under-cap and under button) are CLOSE to correct, but not exactly.

[Yahnay-san]

Prices have gone up a bit since I bought something similar off Amazon a while back but still cheaper than the brass round ones, these help quiet noisy valves if they are not too worn overall.

[1 Ton Tommy]

Any idea if theses 3-48 screws would fit my 1918 Martin? I'd like to do the same on the Mammoth but don't know the size there either. I'd rather not bugger up a screw getting it out without a replacement. I normally work on much bigger stuff with a bore of like 4-1/4," soI may be a little ham-handed working on tiny screws.

[bloke]

Any idea if theses 3-48 screws would fit my 1918 Martin? I'd like to do the same on the Mammoth but don't know the size there either. I'd rather not bugger up a screw getting it out without a replacement. I normally work on much bigger stuff with a bore of like 4-1/4," soI may be a little ham-handed working on tiny screws.

It's not really necessary to come up with 3-48 nylon screws and trim them down. The common valve guide thread these days (has so many instruments have gone to the cheapie Asian method of sticking them on top and being held in place by a small metal washer articulated by the valve stem) is M3 x .5

It just needs to be a thread size that's preferably no wider than the guide itself.
Before bidenflation, thread taps in this size range for about $5 with free shipping. These days they're probably $10, if not $12 - as everything now costs double, as does shipping.

The reason I mentioned the metric thread is because if you look around enough you can find those nylon metric threaded guides pre-made if you don't feel like you can take a 3-48 SAE nylon screw and trim the head down to the shape of a guide.

To answer your question, I don't know whether your Martin guide threads are SAE 3-48, but I'd probably bet 20 bucks that they are.
Just be sure and use some really excellent and well pointed (superbly defined 90° jaw interiors) to unscrew the originals, so you don't chew them up, in case you have to put them back in.

[bloke]

I'm sort of a Bix Beiderbecke fan (as he and his parents lived a couple of blocks away from my mother's and my grandparents' house when my mother was a little girl - the last few years before the "Roaring Twenties"), and anyone who knows anything about him and his amazing cornet playing knows about - saxophonist - Frankie Trumbauer, that Mr. Trumbauer (who also had previously worked in a small combo with young Mr. Beiderbecke prior to both of them really making the big time) was also in the Paul Whiteman Band (as was Beiderbecke) during the time when American in Paris was a brand new piece of music, and that he (Trumbauer) doubled on bassoon (and - very likely - the other woodwinds as well).
Of course, at least one of Whiteman's woodwind players had a bass clarinet and of course Whiteman had a tuba/bass man (it was actually Mike Trafficante, but there was also a backup bass player I believe), so (more well known in America at that time than any purely "classical" orchestra) any orchestration written especially for that band (which was sort of an orchestra, because Whiteman carried three or four fiddles) could have featured any of those three instruments on that final solo instrument playing of that motif.

Just in case anyone doesn't think that Ferdinand Grofé (Whiteman's composer/orchestrator) was a big deal, in 1928 Paul Whiteman paid him $375 weekly, which - in today's money - is about $8,000 bucks.. Trumbauer made $200 weekly with Whiteman that year (as did Beiderbecke), which is roughly $5,000 in today's money.

The way things were originally written in that era to be played by ensembles such as Whiteman's - as well as pit orchestras and pickup orchestras for concerts and recordings - weren't necessarily cast in stone and - if we can believe what we've heard - different instruments played the serpent/ophicleide/tuba parts of Berlioz's pieces when he toured with his music in Europe roughly a century earlier, depending on who owned what instrument and which orchestra, yes?

As one might have guessed, Whiteman's band was the first to perform and record the Grand Canyon Suite. That beautiful majestic theme in the "Cloudburst" movement played by unison trombones was originally played by one solo trombone with a Humes and Berg Solotone mute inserted in their bell and with slide vibrato.

Anyway, as I've tried to show that that last solo statement of that motif isn't necessarily "our" solo (Intergalactic Tuba Day or no), we also shouldn't feel like we can take more liberties with it (including crapping all over it by players who barely know how to spell Gershwin's name) beyond the sentimentality obviously implied and built into the phrase itself.

Curiously, as closely associated as Paul Whiteman was with George Gershwin, the Whiteman Band didn't record it until the early fifties, around the same time that the Gene Kelly/Leslie Caron movie came out:

By then, it was a tuba solo and no, neither did that tuba make an ass of himself, and simply played the ink:
My best guess would be that the tuba player at that time was Mr. Samuel Heiss.
(Cue to 5:50)



Even though this recording was released just about simultaneously with the Gene Kelly movie, it was MGM (Hollywood) musicians who recorded the soundtrack.

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I sort of picked up on the fact that enough bullsh!t has been said about that stupid tuba solo in American in Paris (probably performed on YouTube and Facebook by hundreds of expert young scholars), so I sort of broadened the subject - hoping others might take up on the broadening and broaden it even more.

[1 Ton Tommy]

Today while waitng for the paint to dry on another project, I pulled the valves on an old old (1914) Martin valve set with slides, that some nice folks on this site sent me post paid - thank you very much. I found the guides to have been soldered in place but on one valve there was the ghost of a screw after I dressed the solder down with a jewler's file. These valves look terrible but pop nicely when I pull the slides They are about 0.040 IIRC smaller than the 1918 Martin so I can't use the pistons alone. So for now I'm leaving it alone.

However my 1959 Mammoth has good tight valves in what I believe to be stainless. They are marked with V and T and the valve no. but nothing else. This is all good except (there is too often an except, isn't there) except that they're noisy and the 1st valve piston is very hard to get back into the bore when oiling the valves - so hard that I've taken to putting the piston in the freezer for a few minutes then reassembling. I did not tell my wife that I oil the valve before putting it in the freezer. Anyhow, once I get the piston about an inch in it slides in freely and never sticks.

So today (paint still not dry) I took some measurements on the valve set:
Bore diameter -- 1.0325" as far down as my bore gauge reaches. I am surprised it's that big.
Piston: -- top - 1.0320
Piston: --bottom - 1.0325-1.033 - it's not round

I suspect somebody dropped the piston or it was imperfectly manufactured. So I took my jewler's file and dressed down any burrs I could feel (there were some) and now it's better but not enough better. It doesn't stick and I want to keep it that way but I loathe oiling that 1st valve.

As for the valve guides; I unscrewed one and measured it against the nylon ones I bought on flebay last week. The brass ones are 0.102" and the nylon #3 ones are 0.113. Is 0.102 a metric size? If I can find nylon ones that size I'd buy them. Even file down hex head ones.