Clarinet

We got our first customer owned clarinet and our mission was to do an overhaul (take everything apart, clean the body and the keys, fix any problems, put in new pads and new cork). I picked a Buffet E11 and there didn't seem to be too many problems at first glance. The pads that were on it were not so great looking, but that didn't matter because they weren't sticking around.

I could tell that no one replaced the corks either because they were all the original synthetic silencers that Buffet put on at the factory. I could also tell that it hadn't been cleaned in a while because when I pulled the synthetic stuff off the back of the keys, everything under the synthetics was nice and shiny.

When I was doing my inspection, I noticed that there was a bunch of gunk in just about all the tone holes, and when I got the keys off, the amount of gunk just increased.

I got all the keys off and cleaned them with the detergent soak and cleaned the body with Murphy's Oil Soap (because wood bodies need special soap to make sure they don't dry out). After the cleaning, everything looked much, much better.

The keys looked really nice after they got out of the detergent so I didn't need to do a lot of buffing, but there were some spots I needed to get, which took almost no time at all and after I was done, the keys were super shiny.

I had a handful of keys that were really loose so I spent about two days on them and after I was finished they were nice and snug. Padding didn't necessarily go that well. I ended up burning the body a little bit near the A key and I didn't notice I had burnt the body until I smelled the pad burning. I fixed the burn and if you didn't know where it was, you probably wouldn't notice.

I finished the padding on the upper joint and moved to the lower joint. It's a good idea to check to make sure the body seals on its own before putting pads on in case there are any minor cracks that need fixing and it's a good thing I checked my lower joint because it turns out that there was a large crack where the pinkie levers are attached to the body.

Usually there are two separate posts that are embedded in the body that the level hinge rods are screwed into. Buffet decided to save time and money by putting in one plate with two screw holes which is all well and good, but if there's a crack hiding behind the plate, it's durn near impossible to see. To find the leak, I had to plug up all the tone holes and ends, turn on the vacuum machine and submerge the whole joint under water. If there's a leak, air bubbles will come streaming out, and sure enough they did. I took the plate off and the bubbles got worse.

The only fix for this is to fill the space with super glue, but not just any super glue. Super thin super glue. And you only need a small drop to fix the crack, which takes a lot of talent and finesse. Also, it's a bad idea to get glue anywhere except where you need it because these clarinets are painted black instead dyed and the de-curer will take the glue and paint right off. To make sure you get glue only where you want it, you make a tape barrier.

The tape barrier worked and after about four or five layers of glue, the crack sealed up and I could continue padding. That's when I found out that almost all of my tone holes weren't level. I used tone hole levelers with self stick sand paper on the bottom and sanded and sanded, occasionally checking with a flat one without sand paper, until there were perfect circles and the pads actually sealed. This and the crack showed up about two days before the clarinet was due and I was feeling the pressure.

I came into school early and stayed late and finally got everything finished and working properly. It even played well after I was finished with it too.