If you look at conventional rotary valves, however, there is a 45-degree knuckle at each valve casing, plus the 90-degree turn in the rotor itself. It is impossible to go straight through a series of rotary valves. The 90-degree turn is an inevitable aspect of rotary valves. The zig-zag approach gets rid of the 45-degree knuckles. Thus, one has 90 degrees less of total bend per valve.UncleBeer wrote:Nope. Take a look. I see five distinct right angles in the valves. What do you see?
Older rotary instruments used to bring the leadpipe into the first-valve casing at the 45-degree angle to avoid a knuckle there. Likewise, the departure from the last valve into the tuning-slide area left the casing at a 45-degree angle. I suspect the only reason they don't still do that is so that all the casings can be made the same, with the only differences which way the knuckle is turned on the valve branch side.
This approach avoids at least half the corner turning of the conventional design.
But that is a theoretical argument at best. Before there could be any value in such a design, one would have to demonstrate what problem there is with the conventional approach that could be solved. I'll bet that would be hard to do. And I'll bet that this trick has been tried before, too. If Art had the idea, then it's possible someone else did as well, and carried it out. But the improvement has to make enough difference to overcome any resulting problems for the player.
Rick "thinking not all experiments succeed, either functionally or commercially" Denney
