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You know that you need to keep your horn clean. If you are proactive about maintenance you will hardly ever need to have your horn cleaned professionally. But sometimes it needs a deeper cleaning.
A piece of good advice from my first band director
My first band director was named Conrad Steinel. His advice was that if you clean the leadpipe out with a snake and blow water through the horn you will get most of what is in it out.
That advice remains really true. Whenever you have a good block of time – certainly at least every 3 months or so on a horn you play daily – snake out the leadpipe, blow water in the horn, and lube the valves and slides. If you do that reasonably regularly (oiling the valves every week!) you will have very little need of a professional cleaning.
What if your valves are sticking or dragging?
This is a sign that there is likely green corrosion on the rotor or on the casing of the valve. No amount of valve oil will solve this problem. This corrosion needs to be removed.
Warning: Don’t make your valves super clean either
Some readers are handy enough to disassemble a rotary valve. You can clean the rotor yourself fairly easily. A gentle cleaning is fine, and actually you can often make valves work significantly better by just wiping them off well and putting them back in with fresh oil. But if you are tempted to polish them up shiny and bright with brass polish, please don’t!
There is a stable surface to be found in the non-shiny brass patina that naturally forms. Don’t be tempted to polish your valve beyond that point. Sometimes I see someone post a photo on social media of their valve that they cleaned to be really shiny, and I cringe. There are thousandths of an inch tolerances in your valve, you don’t want to take off any more material than necessary. That is one of the general reasons for the popularity of ultrasonic cleaning.
Why ultrasonic?
A primary reason to use ultrasonic rather than chem cleaning is that chem cleaning actively takes off metal, and ultrasonic just bombards the horn with sound waves in a cleaning solution. Done right it can’t damage your horn.
What I have found is that my ultrasonic cleaner as set up presently won’t remove all the heavy green corrosion, but it does seem to loosen it up somewhat, so that I can scrape a light coating it off with mostly wooden scrapers (lightly touching the surface with a brass scraper if necessary). Don’t ever use a steel tool on the surface of a valve or the casing (or at least use extreme caution!), it will do damage, as will any abrasive (no sand paper on a valve ever!).
UPDATE: But note, I think many shops say they are doing an ultrasonic cleaning, but that does not mean that they don’t also use chemicals to remove stubborn green scale. Please see the longer update at the end of this article.
Ultrasonic cleaning and the average local shop that cleans a lot of school band instruments, where working with a higher end French horn is a complete novelty
The first two of my horns to run through my own ultrasonic cleaner were my big Paxman 25 and my Patterson Geyer. Each one had slightly sad stories related to being cleaned in a shop that mostly cleans band instruments, which unfolded clearly as I worked on them.
The worst issue on the Paxman was that the lower bearing of the second valve rotor had deep grooves in it. I have no idea why they are there, but I certainly did not do that to the valve. Another almost as bad issue was the spring for the thumb valve, clearly, they had trouble putting it on the instrument, and one side is bent oddly and not functioning as strongly as it did before. It is on one less turn than Paxman intended. This horn is slightly more compact and fit in the cleaner better than the Patterson.
On the Patterson, first I’ll mention how I love this design for working on, a Geyer is not cramped at all with extra tubes and such. The big issue was that the valves are marked clearly that they are built in opposite order. 1 is the thumb valve, and the valves marked as 2-3-4 are the 3-2-1 valves. As you look down at the horn, the valves are marked 4-3-2-1. However, the horn came back to me with the second and third valve rotors and bearings on the wrong valves! My guess is the tech could not comprehend that the first valve was not number 1. And the horn got played for quite a while like that, looking down at the horn the valves were marked 4-2-3-1. They are correct now.
Oh, and while I’m talking about local repair shop people in general, many don’t know how to reassemble a rotary valve properly, leaving the top inner bearing not seated on fully. And the valve works fine even if not assembled properly. This is very bad, and a reason to think about only going to individuals familiar with higher end instruments and rotary valves — or becoming more familiar with the process yourself. At least to the extent that you know the work was done right, or that you do as much as you are comfortable with on your own. Because, as I said earlier, you probably only need to ultrasonic clean a horn when the valves are showing signs of corrosion impacting the valve action.
My 15-liter ultrasonic
I figured out the Patterson valve order issue a while ago, and that was part of what inspired me to buy my own “small” ultrasonic unit. It is a lot bigger than one you would use for jewelry, and I knew through a contact that it would be big enough to submerge the valve section of a horn – but small enough for my shop space.
Without going to a all-out blow by blow on how to ultrasonic clean a horn, the basic thing (which you could pick up from watching Instagram videos posted by some shops) is that you completely disassemble the valves and mechanism before cleaning. If you are not comfortable with that step, all the other steps don’t really matter, and if you are, you can probably come up with how to actually do the cleaning in a cleaner of this size. I will add, though, that the solution I am using presently is a type of Zep cleaner, diluted 50/50 in water. It works better than the Simple Green I used in a prior, small ultrasonic.
Results
The results are the two horns done so far play GREAT afterwards. The best they have felt in years. So now it is …
On to more horns!
I own too many horns probably, but I now have a great project, I’m planning to clean a horn every weekend. Next up will be my triple, I wonder what tales it will tell?
UPDATE
A video
The below was recently posted by Houghton Horns, well worth a watch. A yearly cleaning by a competent shop would be a great plan.
Several interesting things are notable to me. One is they do a combination of ultrasonic and chem cleaning, the rotors are chem cleaned. Another is that they have a “power brush,” a brush in a power drill, to clean down the slide tubes. That might be handy for attacking and preventing the green scale. But be careful, you could damage your valves with the steel wire inside the brush.
More thoughts on green scale
Working on a Yamaha 662 project horn I encountered a lot of green scale. In the photo, I’ve begun work on manually scraping all that off that I could reach with three different tools. Ultrasonic alone only does so much. If I had a way to chem clean this area that should have been able to take it off or loosen the green scale a great deal.
When the 662 came to me, supposedly it had recently been professionally cleaned. And some things were real clean, but they did not do anything about the green scale down in the body of the horn. The photo is of the point when I had most of the scale removed from the third valve ports, and you can see the scale in the 1st and 2nd ports.
This cleaning easily took me 4 hours with multiple times in the ultrasonic. There is a learning process, and this was a good horn to work on more. But it was a bunch of work that would have been avoided if prior owners had cleaned the horn more often, and a level of cleaning that a well equipped shop (one that is familiar with working on higher end horns) should be able to do.
For a final cleaning story see, “Play clean!”
