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As a repairman, I LOVE marching season I especially enjoy the Conn spin and the King twirl Tear 'em up, guys... I can use the parts!

My marching Tuba at my school has a bent leadpipe, scratches and a huge dent in the bottom bow from me. God I hate band camp accidents.

kinda off topic but i had to add it in...................My director was conducting at a new auditorium she wasnt used to (no rail on the edge).....backed up too far and up..........down to the pit. (no snakes ) I was at a fun concert and while my best friends, dad's band was getting ready to play, he dropped his $12K 6 stringg bass ....tumbling off the stage.\

O ya and this year (before christmas) were out concert band playing tests, as usual i get kinda nervous and ready for my test, not paying attention, i walked my euph to my directors office with the horn to my left side, facing the direction i was going.... The doorway being two doors (left one closed), i kept walking and walked at a fast pace ramming half of my bell straight into the closed dooor , amazing little damage but im sure my euph was in pain. though it was embarassing, I took my mind off the playing test and managed to get a 97% :D

I was marching with southwind in 03-04 and the first season i marched we where doing a four to five drill move and a gun tripped and crinkled his whole entire front side of his tuba. The whole bell was nothing but a mess. all of the brackets where broken and valves where bent. The next season a girl was carrying her contra and dropped it and everything on the bottom half was totally bent and scratched and messed up. Thank god for the Brass Repair Guy from DEG. thats about it for marching horns

Freshmen Year, our show was
SYmphony Fantastique
March to the Scaffold
Witches Sabbeth
Then out of nowhere, Superstition (Stevie Ray)

anywho, we were into the first mvt. of the show (march to the scaffold) and we were at the part building to the end of the show. and i was marching last in our sousa line, and the guy in front of me was a few inchs over 6' (me, i was 5' nothin.) and i realize my shoe is untied............yeah u know this cant be good. I start focusing on how my shoe is untied. and then i tumbled. and after hitting the ground, my second thought was o shnap Devin is about to run me over. so i roll out of the way and get back up and march into formation. devin sees me pop up behind him, and he starts laughing. RIGHT ON THE FIELD and i cant help but laugh. so we are both chuckeling at the end of mvt.1 mvt. goes RIGHT into the Dies Irae

uh oh.....it was hard but we managed to hold our laughing in. then after the show was done, we observed the damage.....yeah not too bad just bent one of the screws on the bell.

well that was fun.

So last season we had a buttload of solder joints coming loose and what not. Teacher spends a buttload of money getting it fixed, and then next season the solder joints all fall out again.

Another time, the leadpipe of the sousa got so bad that it was literally butterflied open like a shrimp.

And my rookie year in the brass section, I was zealously using brasso to polish the bell of the sousa, trying to get this ugly yellow spot out. I later realize that I actually went through the silver plating and was polishing the brass underneath.

Dropping a trumpet and getting the bell bent out of shape was the small accident. I never found out who the vandal was, but while I was at basketball practice in junior high school (before I started marching with a sousaphone as a freshman) someone took the valves out of my trumpet, bashed them against the brick wall at the inside of the entrance to the school, and shoved them back into the casings. The owner/tech of the local music store was nothing less than a genius with magical hands and tools, as he got the original valves working in the casings again, repairing the damage to both.

JeremyI wrote:.... his tuning bits were melted to the inside of the horn...i mean...the brass was fused together. .... What I can't figure out is how it got fused together in the first place.

The question i'm trying to get at is: How much heat would be required to make something like that happen?

You didn't say, but I'll guess that your bits were lacquered. My Conn bits get stuck together all the time. The tapers are 'locking tapers' and are designed to 'stay put' once they are adjusted. Usually all that's required to get them apart is a few well-placed taps with a small rawhide mallet. Heat wasn't the problem.

A number of mishaps have happened to me, some worse than others. my first year of marching band was not too great. it was the first practice I ever went to. some of the older kids were helping me and the other 3 new kids getting sousaphones put together. I was all set with mine and they told me to go into the band room where everyone else had already started practicing. I walked there pretty fast, seeing how i was pretty late and all. the director was in the middle of his big speech about the upcoming year and what not. remember, this was the first time I ever wore a sousa. No one told me how to go through doors though. I come practically flying in there and just smash the bell on the door. everone was all serious, listening to him and then i had to go and do that. I was pretty embarassed, but they all laughed. later that year I managed dropping a mouthpiece off the top of our bleachers, ramming into the drumline during a passthrough a number of times and superglued my fingers together trying to reattatch the peral on one of my valves. the next year only got worse. the bell fell right off and landed on the parking lot's blacktop putting a number of big dents in it, on a really hot day i passed out and fell over, doing more damage to the horn, and to top it off one more thing happened. there was a thunderstorm during bandcamp so we went into the theatre to record the song. I was one of the first to go in there. nobody had bothered to turn the lights on yet but i knew where i was going. I walk across the stage and go down these stairs that lead to the audience. the stairs were moved over a little bit because they were working on the pit about 9 or 10 feet below, so of course I fall right into the hole and shoot right down there. I would have landed on my feet but the sousa was too big to fit through so I was dangling there by a sousaphone just yelling for help. other kids came and pulled me up but it was really a weid experience. there's lots more but its too many to write out. no accidents happened to me this year though. hopefully i got all the accidents taken care of my first two years[/b]

The worst thing that happened to my tuba in an accident was I was moving to the Northeastern U.S. for job purposes and I flew there. My tuba had just been overhauled and relacquered at the old Mirafone factory in Sun Valley (Los Angeles). So I forked out the big bucks to have the tuba sit in the seat next to me on the airplane.

When I got to my new place, I didn't see the "black ice" on the path to the front door. I slipped and fell on top of my tuba, which suffered some major dents.

Whew.. these posts are hilarious..

well last year during a stadium rehearsal i was running late, so i rushed and picked up my sousaphone and started running to the formations block...well i had to jump over somthing,(cant really remember what it was) but at the speed i was running it was more of a leap..well just my fate. I tripped and fell flat on my face, but i really kinda just smashed my face on the bell... the astro turf didn't really help as far as coushoining my fall i slid for a lil bit....it made such a loud noise, a few girls asked if i was OK. it made a huge dent on the bell of my souzy..but an even bigger dent in my pride funny looking back on it though..

The topic of this thread got me to thinking--a tuba accident. Isn't that how we end up with another trumpet? Just one of those weird, random thoughts....

I wonder why the kid is smiling...

Why is the tuba smelly?

SOTStuba wrote:I heard of a guy who had just bought a brand new st. pete and got a gig bag for convienence sake...well one day he was getting ready for school and was loading his stuff into his truck...he sat his horn down behind it for some reason and went back inside to grab something else...well he came back out jumped in the truck and ran over his brand new horn...just hearing that made me want to cry

I know a girl who did the same thing with her tenor sax, but the kicker was that she didn't realize it was her sax. She thought she had backed over her dog and sat in her car for an hour crying until someone would look. She just couldn't bring herself to do it.

Slightly O/T, about 10 years ago I backed over an Ibanez bass guitar in its case with a Chevy Lumina and even stopped for a couple of seconds with the rear wheels on top of the case. The case was squashed a bit, and chunks of ABS plastic were broken off the bottom. Everything inside the case was in perfect shape. Even my delicate tuner was untouched. The case really did its job. I still have both the case and the bass, and they still work just fine.

Not a tuba, but I have a single french horn that a school bus ran over. A friend gave it to me, thinking I could use the valves for something... only the bell was flattened. I gave it one look and thought, "How does one mess with art?". Yes, it came in a case to match.

And when another friend, principal horn of the Philidelphia Orchestra, played it, you know, it still didn't sound half bad...

My Olds Ambassador Cornet in it's hard case took a tumble out of the band trailer and got run over by a semi-truck. The bell was flattened but the rest of the horn relatively undamaged.
I had to play it for a few days until I found another horn.I used a long screwdriver to open up the bell. It didn't sound that much different than before the tragedy. The guys in the band tried to get me to play it as it was to outdo Dizzy Gillespie. I felt my image would suffer.

OUCH!