No ferrule? No problem!

[bloke]

Add it to the pile…

[gocsick]

I worry sometimes that my work seems amateurish... whoo buddy... this makes me feel so good about myself.

[Tubajug]

That's quite the valve circuitry!

[bloke]

In the summer, when is the situation whereby if I spend more than about an hour or an hour and a half (preferably thirty minutes or less) putting a completely wrecked marching baritone back together, I'm going to pick the fastest tacks (methods) that hold up the best, particularly considering that there's a 10% chance it's going to be torn right back up in theee weeks, and a 90% chance it's going to be torn right back up in a year (and none of that destruction will be due to any shortcomings in my repairs).

I can doodle around and do real pretty repairs on that stuff (and upload videos of it on social media while wearing blue rubber gloves), and then what good did that do? Those sorts of repairs need to look good (good enough, at least as good as the rest of the instrument that wasn't torn up) and they need to be strong.

Back around 1980 or 1981, there was one-man auto repair shop right next to where our first commercial repair shop was located. Mrs. bloke had a '71 Toyota Corona Mark II. It needed something done to the engine and I was helping him repair it. There was a bunch of oily crap that had leaked out (probably around the valve cover gasket, etc.), and I was trying to wipe it off as we took things apart to get to the problem.

After doing that a couple of times, he looked at me and said

Are we going to fvck around, or are we going to fix it?

With certain types of repairs, that question echoes In my mind regularly.

When someone brings in something really nice, I'm going to be really picky.

When I'm working on my own stuff, I'm going to be really picky, but I'm only going to barely clean up after I've done the work, because nobody's paying me to polish and lacquer parts of my own instruments.