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Here are some cautionary tales about instruments that ended up in the repair shop because of objects that worked their way into the horns. Horns don’t usually suffer from the extreme things found in old sousaphones, but they can get things stuck in them.
We used to have a card taped to the wall with a plastic bag stapled to it. The card read, “Item found in horn”, and that item was a plastic “gem”, popular among the young set at the time. This particular student had somehow allowed one of these “gems” to float loose in the case and get way up into the instrument.
We knew the horn was stuffed up somewhere but we couldn’t find the item, so we stuck the air compressor nozzle in the leadpipe and the plastic piece shot out of the horn and skittered across the room.
Plenty of unsecured mouthpieces rattle around in cases and dent instruments, but the oddest such was a horn that came in completely stuffed up. It was purchased at an online auction, and it had problems. Someone had “overhauled” it, and done some weird things. After taking out all the tubes, I isolated the problem to the bell area. Some inspection revealed that the bell had been reshaped and clearly had been filled with pitch prior to re-bending.
There was a lot of left over pitch down in the bell, so I surmised that it was the pitch that stuffed it up. After severe efforts to get it all out, I was satisfied that quite a good deal was gone.
But the stuffiness remained.
Something was still in there, and I could not figure it out. In desperation, I applied heat to hand guard area, hoping to remove it and see if there was something hidden under there, and “ssshhhh – plunk”, out slid a mouthpiece that had gotten wedged up in the bell tail. The horn cost the owner $400 at the auction, but the repair bill when all was said and done was $250. Not exactly the bargain the owner expected.
But the strangest thing I ever found in a horn was a pencil. It’s not strange that a pencil could work its way in to a horn. What was strange was where this pencil was, and how it got there. It was in the leadpipe, just in the bend in front of the tuning slide.
In other words, there was no way this pencil could have gotten wedged in there without removing the tuning slide. Someone put it in there on purpose. It turns out that “someone” was a competitor of the owner, who must have sabotaged the horn at the previous weekend’s all-state tryouts.
Lessons learned: Secure the objects in your case so they won’t damage your instrument.
And, never leave your horn unattended at a competition.
