interesting turning project

Re: interesting turning project

darrin hill

curious how they make a curved piece..

Re: interesting turning project

John K Jordan

>curious how they make a curved piece...

I wondered that too:

Turn a ring with a u-shaped cross section, then cut the ring in half and glue them together to form a 180 degree hollow tube. Pretty clever!

Now I want to make a bugle. (Like a trumpet but without the complexity of valves!) I suspect 80% of the effort was in the precision valves and making all the extra tubing to switch in and out.

JKJ

Re: interesting turning project

Dale Gillaspy

I had been working on one, but not a functioning one, just solid tubes. Now I feel somewhat inferior

Re: interesting turning project

ebd

I notice that it doesn't have the valve to blow out condensation. I can't imagine it plays well as temp would change pitch and condensation would make it impossible to tune. Very difficult project skill wise, and beautiful - but not especially practical IMO.

Re: interesting turning project

Stuart Johnson

On WoW he said it sounds like a duck.

Re: interesting turning project

John K Jordan

>I notice that it doesn't have the valve to blow out condensation. I can't

>imagine it plays well as temp would change pitch and condensation would

>make it impossible to tune. Very difficult project skill wise, and beautiful -

>but not especially practical IMO.

You are right, this is not the LEAST bit practical! I think Eric Gourieux, who made this trumpet and the guy who did the wooden french horn in the American Woodturner magazine certainly did - he referred to his piece as a "sculpture... made for display." These instruments probably have as much functionality as a lot of the other "art" pieces I see. :-)

Besides the dampened resonance in the tubing and bell and the problems with moisture, I think another big issue with making a functional copy of a brass instrument is the ID of the tubing. Since the wood tubing is much thicker than brass, you would be faced with either making the ODs match a "real" instrument for looks at the expense of restricting the air movement (which is critical), or keeping the ID correct and making a "fat", distorted-looking trumpet!

BTW, some brass instruments are made without water valves. The expectation is to tilt or remove a slide to drain if necessary. One of my French horns had no water valve until I bought one and soldered it on while doing some other mods. For the horn it may not as critical since to remove all the condensation still requires a procedure involving rotations and valve operation. I have a bugle here with no valve either, just needs a tilt to drain. Since most of the condensation occurs in the lead pipe, the same should work with a trumpet.

Here's a note from the guy who built the wooden french horn, Murry Stein:

http://www.texasjewisharts.org/news/2015/10/9/murray-steins-horn-in-national-magazine

The Oct 2015 American Woodturner magazine has a fantastic article by Murry about the why and how of making a wooden horn. A beautiful job and with yellow pine from his scrap pile!

http://www.woodturner.org/?page=aw2010s

JKJ