Archived under: Equipment, Teaching | James Boldin, Valves
How Do you Take Apart a Rotary Valve? [Updated with Video]
This topic comes up pretty often, and came up for me yesterday in a series of phone calls from a former student. Many are afraid to try and my standard advice is if you can’t change a tire on your car don’t try to take apart a rotary valve. It is not difficult but you do need to be somewhat mechanical, and to have worked on your car or to have built models is a plus.
I don’t see much online on this topic. A fairly good description of how to disassemble a trombone rotary valve may be found here. For an overview of rotary valves the articles on the Osmun website on Rotary Valve Maintenance and Stringing a Rotary Valve are quite good.
UPDATE (2009): James Boldin, Assistant Professor of horn at the University of Louisana at Monroe has posted a great pair of videos on how to take apart rotary valves on YouTube. Part I is below:
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