Tools: Level One

Tools: Level One Learning to Do It Yourself Regular Maintenance and Minor Repairs On Your Own Saxophone Before using the information presented here, please read this. These are the basic tools you will want to do maintenance and minor repairs on a saxophone between major servicings as detailed in the Level 1 Guides.   Of …

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Otto Link (The Man Himself) Refacing Article, 1950

This is a short article from the summer 1950 edition of “The Clarinet”, featuring the actual Otto Link talking about his refacing process. I have an old Otto Link ad for refacing services published at about the same time- the cost to reface a mouthpiece was $3.  Of course, “refacing” in this sense is just plugging …

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How To Say “Buescher”

How to pronounce the name of the Buescher Band Instrument Company (named after the founder, Gus Buescher) is something that comes up frequently among folks such as myself- saxophone geeks who also like to get things right- and while the story is a little complex, there is what I think is a “right” way to …

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A 3-D Printed Saxophone

Olaf Diegal, a professor of product development at the Lund Universty, has created a partially playable saxophone through additive manufacturing- also known as 3-D printing.  Read the original article here and read my short commentary below. While I think this is quite promising and I am zero percent surprised having followed 3D printing for a while …

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A Really Nice Tenor Saxophone Mouthpiece Facing

One of the less common things to see around is a nice mouthpiece facing, freely given.  Perhaps this is because refacing is not something you should try lightly (and if you do, prepare to ruin a lot of mouthpieces until you get good at it), or perhaps because the facing curve is not so well …

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How I Polish Silver Saxophones

One of the more common questions I get from someone who has recently browsed my galleries and horns for sale is “How do you polish silver?” or sometimes “How can I polish my saxophone to make it look like yours?” Well you can’t polish it like I do without a full disassembly and removal of …

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A King Feast

I am lucky enough to live down the street from Brian from GetASax.com, and every once in a while we find that between the two of us we are in temporary possession of an unusually full grouping of a particular type of saxophone.  Last time, it was a Conn night.  This time, it was Kings. …

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On Learning A Craft

  Last night I was reading through my “new” Woodwind Quarterly magazines that I bought just a few days ago in a nearly complete collection from another repairman.  These are old, repair-centered periodicals that were published for a brief time in the 1990s until 2001.  Very geeky, extremely interesting, and packed with amazing knowledge.  I’ve …

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