Sometimes you have a spring that is either broken. It just doesn’t function right. The instrument is obviously leaking something knees, hold it down. I kind of mentioned to stay away from the big, the big rubber bands. They do work well as a spring material, but something I’ve recently found that I really like are the little miniature hair bands that they use.
I think for people that either do dreadlocks and beaded beaded, hair or things like that, so they’re, very small they’re. You know you just do one thing, so let’s say that this key was just flopping and not holding open. We could put it over there now. We don’t want to go on top of another key, so we can open the one that we don’t want it to go on, put it over the one that we need it to put it down, and that’s that’s good to go. If you have a key.
That goes up and down like this one, it needs to be pulled open rather than held shut. Now this is a spring hook. I didn’t find a crochet hook, but a basic crochet hook. You can find you file just a little slot in the end of it. It allows you to push and pull on these needle Springs safety notice.
These are made literally from needles, and they are extremely sharp if you’re not aware of it. I came back a little bit ago and I noticed that I had actually bled on a little spot of this, because I poked myself and didn’t even notice it and you don’t want to do that on your own instrument. You definitely don’t want to bleed on somebody else’s instrument, so any rate we’ve got this key here. We will assume that that the spring doesn’t function. So this key is supposed to be able to stay up.
It’S not staying up it just flops in the wind anywhere along this key. It doesn’t matter if it’s where the pad is or where the ring is. It’S still all the same key you take your little rubber band hook, it underneath the part of it, and this is one of those where you’ll just want to be aware whether or not it affects these other keys and try to find something that you hope can Hook it on to, but now we see that goes up and down if it’s not quite enough pressure, put a second band on it or stretch it to a to a farther distance. Sometimes you can go there and go around a couple of posts and that spot there will work it’s a it works really well again from the repairman’s standpoint, they’re easy to remove they’re done and that person then can go in and do what they need to do To repair that properly, okay, so you might be wondering, what’s with the fire, what’s with the lighters, pads are held in by some sort of a material that can be softened with heat and then cools and holds the pad in place. Sometimes we have a leak.
That is causing an instrument not to play or like say the pad fell out. We need to reinstall it one of the ways that you need to check for leaks. This is a popsicle stick with a little piece of mylar, which was our our balloon. It’S point: zero, zero, zero, five thick, it’s like five ten thousandths of an inch thick and what happens is, if I put this feeler under here and it grabs that means that part of the pad is sealing and air doesn’t escape. You want to learn to go all the way around at least four points of the compass when you’re checking a pad to see if it if it holds okay I’ll go on to a bigger one, so that we can see this a bit better.
So you put it underneath release it tug if it if it grabs out that way, it’s it’s sealing. If we go in there and we we go to pull it out and it just slides right out. Air is leaking at that spot. So let’s check this pad. This is just a little bit light on the back.
This would not affect really the way that this instrument plays, but it’s something I can feel so if it were huge and this instrument didn’t play, we would want to heat up the adhesive that is in in that pad again we’re being very careful of the direction Of the heat of the larger, the pad the more heat it’s going to take until it’s soft enough to be able to move, so you may want to do this a couple of times until you do it until it’ll move. One of our things is a cake decorating, spatula known as a pad slick on the smaller pads popsicle sticks, work. Fine, I’ve made these from all manner of things, so we heat it up, I’m shifting the pad in the direction that I felt that it was leaking. So, in this case it’s leaking in the back, so I want to try to shift the front of the pad, so the back comes in. I open it up put the feeler in test.
It see if it grabs check for uniformity around the perimeter, and you just do that until you get an even pull all the way around. This is a very, very fine method of detecting leaks. It’S definitely the standard of the industry for for woodwinds so, and these are really really easy to make. Another material that you can use is what I’ll have them cigarette paper you can buy a little. You know find a tobacco store, get a little package of rolling papers if you still have cassette tapes that have that have died.
The material on that is thin enough. That works. The little pull here on a pack of playing cards works real well, any of those types of materials are suitable for a fear. The lighter your holder, the more sense of the fetal, will be okay. So that’s a really good thing.
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