Posted by Too long a lunch... on February 23, 2004 at 16:37:54:
No horse too dead to beat. I came across an old thread on this board debating the actual effect of silver plating on the weight of a horn. Mighty minds calculated that 12 ounces of silver (not touching the slugs with a salt shaker) would cover a tuba with four microns of silver plate. But while this is a decent ball park estimate of mass gain for the silver plate model over a finishless tuba it doesn't account for the weight of the lacquer on most tubas. Not knowing the actual density of dried lacquer but knowing that it's greater than that of coffee (just put a flake off my old tuba in my cup here and it sank), and taking the figure cited in the thread that had silver at about 26.7 times the density of water, I figure any lacquer coating of (26.7 times .0004).011 or better weighs as much as silver. And I figure most lacquer coatings to be thicker than a hundredth of an inch. The point here; well - I haven't worked that out quite yet.
H