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I buffed the ugly lacquer off of both sides of the bell flare, as well as halfway around (outer 180°) the bottom bow and top bow.

I used a high horsepower and very fast buffing machine with a 2 inch wide very hard buffing wheel.

My back is tired.

I also took all the ping dents out of the neck for that tenor sax that I have advertised (which someone has already bought via , mailing a check, which is on the way), I went ahead and buffed the lacquer off of it and hit it with some gold tinted lacquer to match the original lacquer on the body.

I'm not lacquering those areas on the tuba today, because it's raining and it's just too rainy to lacquer something big such as some large areas of a tuba (while spraying out the door of the barn - dodging raindrops and dealing with heavy humidity).

This is not a restoration.
It's a repair job.
Yes it's a darned extensive one, but it's far from perfect.
I don't really think there is such a thing as a restoration, because nothing that ever really needed a restoration can ever really be made absolutely like new again. Anyone who does restorations can look at something that's been restored and see that it's been restored...
...but this is all I'm doing to this thing:






Actually, made by F.E. Olds & Sons when Conn was moving from Elkhart to Texas

Notice that I pulled the bottom bow off - and reinstalled it - WITHOUT burning up that school system ID sticker.

You got that tuba looking superb. Pretty much a defacto econo-refurbish. I hope you are charging them a pretty penny for all that work to get it like that

catgrowlB wrote: Fri May 08, 2026 5:38 pm You got that tuba looking superb. Pretty much a defacto econo-refurbish. I hope you are charging them a pretty penny for all that work to get it like that

Less than $2000, and it includes two pistons that Blake sold me for a really low price (though again, they were the oversized Bach version that I had to fit into those casings) plus a hard case that I picked up for a very low price (which I had bought for one of my own instruments, but it didn't fit). If I had charged much more, it would have been just about the value of the instrument. I'm trying to cement this school as a solid new customer.

I probably spent 15 total hours on it but spread out over several days, and some days I didn't work on it at all.
Remember, I don't work for a store, so there's no boss to hand part of the money to (other than Mrs bloke).