Re: 1936 King rotary?


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Posted by Fred Young on May 11, 2002 at 09:06:49:

In Reply to: 1936 King rotary? posted by Hal Render on May 09, 2002 at 10:18:23:

This looks like the one Ron Bishop played when he was still in school in Rochester, NY. It appears to be the small bore model. There were medium bore ones, 0.75 through the valves and large bore instruments about 0.8 throught the valves. The valves were hollow and had much smaller inertia than the present day solid valves. The string mechanism coupled to hollow valves resulted in very speedy valves. Once one got used to using the correct string and making fast string replacements the valves were great with one exception. The pins that hit the cork stops were solid brass and tended to break during performance. Any engineer who has studied the strength of materials knows that hollow tubes are more shear resistant than solid ones. Whenever one would break on my King tuba I would replace it with a hollow stainless steel tube. The King tuba I had was the large bore model, about 0.8 through the first three valves and larger in the 4th valve. It was built in 1945. Eventually the valves wore out and I could find no one to fix them. I tried several of the most reputable repairmen and they all failed. If only the old King factory in Cleveland had not been closed for several years, I might have found a valve set. I designed a conversion to make my King into a double tuba in EEE/BBb and made a request for bids to various tuba makers. This process lead to the Herbert Gronitz Company in Hamburg, Germany. It took Dietrich Kleine-Horst about 7 weeks to do the work in a most professional way. Not only did he make the conversion, but he tuned up the open tones of the BBb side of the tuba. The original instruments tended to be flat on the second open tone, Bb; sharp on the fourth open tone, Bb; and sharp on the sixth open tone, F. The original slide lengths were compromised to have the optimal amount of flatness to minimize the intonation errors when various valve combinations were used. That resulted in the notes just below the sharp open tones being almost in tune. In the low register one had to lip up the pitch on Bb, A and slightly on Ab. The sharp F was right in tune with the sharp F's on many of the euphoniums!

One can find a picture of my EEE/BBb tuba at http:/www.penn.com/~youngfj/


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