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tubatodd wrote: Wed Oct 14, 2026 10:12 am @bloke how did you decide to put the patch on the outside vs the inside of the bell? My Rudi has a small patch and in my case it was installed/reinstalled on the inside of the bell. Is it dealer's choice, best practice or "depends?"

bloke wrote: Wed Oct 14, 2026 9:51 am The thing that I'm uncomfortable with is
"bloke worked on this instrument, so it's really great"
(or the opposite of that statement).

The fact that people seem to bring into their sales pitch the person who repaired an instrument when getting rid of it is the thing that I'm uncomfortable with. They don't usually do that with cars or houses.
When I do repairs, I'm trying to do as much as I can that benefits an instrument the most for the amount of money the owner has available.
Sometimes (often) it's only a few hundred dollars.
A few hundred dollars these days only buys a handful of my hours, so I have to pick and choose carefully how I spend a customer's money. Money isn't worth anything anymore. We never (maybe about as often as our grandparents did, which was maybe once every year or so at the most) go out to restaurants, because it's just about impossible to get out of a good one (food drink tax tip) without spending over $100, and maybe $200. We've decided that we don't need to spend an hour and a half driving to and from a restaurant and spend money that we earned getting filthy dirty just to eat a meal.
The only way that a $10,000 repair can make any tuba play better in tune (general statement here, nothing to do with this ad) is to jack that one up and run a more in-tune-playing one underneath it. Some people think that soldering chunks of metal to their instruments will fix the tuning, some people believe that putting a piece of wood in their pocket will fix intonation problems, and some people believe that magic mouthpieces or magic mouth pipes will do that.
Whatever.

All of that said, I do a lot of customer work, but I don't make unrealistic promises. They ask me if it will do this or that, and I remind them that I'm a mechanic, not an acoustician, and that I'm not replacing any of the tapered portions of their instruments. (Every once in awhile, a replacement mouth pipe tube will slightly alter intonation characteristics, but who knows if for the better or worse if it does alter it? I've sort of found that keeping them small on the front end is often a good idea, but whatever on mouth pipes. Again - even though I have noticed things and made some observations over the decades, I'm a mechanic.)

Some repair people turn their noses up at institutional repairs, but we gladly do a lot of school repairs. Because I'm pretty quick at all the types of repairs I do, I tend to do more cosmetic repairs on school instruments than a lot of people seem to do. All that said, even though school customers don't pay for 30 or 45 days. At least they don't have unrealistic expectations, they aren't sentimentally attached to instruments which probably should be retired, and frankly they don't cringe when I quote prices (and I don't gouge them - no more than would ever consider abusing an individual customer. When any of us considered gouging the government, all we are doing is stealing from each other, and that's pretty stupid.). Either they authorize the repair or they don't.

I made several general statements in this response.

>> The Alexander tuba (assuming it's in the same condition it was in when it left here handed off to a previous owner) is mechanically sound and structurally sound. None of these comments have anything to do with that individual tuba, but only have to do with my name being brought up as having repaired an instrument that's for sale. I fix broken, worn, and bent stuff. I'm not a magician.