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I've been looking at various tubas in hopes of purchasing one later this year, and I was wondering whether there are any particular pros and cons with regard to satin silver finish. I know it's more expensive, but other than that I have no experience with it. All I know is that it looks exorbitantly classy. Anybody care to enlighten me?

Satin silver was one of the standard finishes of brass band instruments, when I was young. The others were laquer and bare brass, the latter being rare.

Besson/B&H plated the satin instruments twice. Once before the blasting and once after. Some bands were zealous about their instruments being polished. There you eventually would see the brass shine through on the high points.

My instruments shall not be polished and the the low pints may collect a bit of dirt. I wipe the instruments with a soft cloth wetted with valve oil, and that is it. To the boot I save the extra costs for the black nickel finish.

According to bloke the old American way of making satin was about no polishing before plating a generous layer of silver.

Klaus

They are a pain in the arse to keep clean with the pitting collecting tarnish. If you don't mind a horn that looks like was in a fire or spending a significant amount of time cleaning after each use, then they look great.

Bright silver, IMO is a much better way to go.

Satin Silver finish hides finger prints better than bright silver. If you use a silver polish that leaves a film behind (Tarnishield, etc.) then it will stay in the low areas and come out on your clothes. However, washing the horn with Wrights Silver Cream will remove tarnish and rinse clean. I even use Wrights on raw brass horns that I want to clean up a bit but not remove metal.

The [aluminum foil + baking soda + salt + hot water] tarnish removal method keeps surfacing, and I'm thinking to try it one of these days, as much out of curiosity as need.

Assuming I wash the horn really, really thoroughly to get the salts off, should this be gentler on the silver than Hagerty's or the like? Does it affect only the tarnish and leave the remainder untouched? For that matter, do non-abrasive silver polishes affect only the tarnish and leave the rest of the silver alone?

Probably self-evident, but I had a really tough time in freshman chemistry at Cal - would've done lousy even without the 8:00 am labs . . .

Here's one of the threads that discussed the method:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=26914&start=0&hilit ... da#p233174

tokuno wrote:The [aluminum foil + baking soda + salt + hot water] tarnish removal method keeps surfacing, and I'm thinking to try it one of these days, as much out of curiosity as need.

The process is more efficient when you use carbonate of soda, or washing soda, instead of bicarbonate of soda, or baking soda. The chemistry of it has been thrashed about on brass-forum.co.uk, and if anybody is really interested, I'll dig out the links to the chemistry pages that show how and why it works, and why the carbonate is a better catalyst than the bicarbonate.

It's good. Very good. But it's not perfect. You might even need a second bath if it's really badly tarnished, and still need to touch it up.

Taking the 38K as an example, satin silver looks great. It does hide fingerprints, and gives a patina appearance without all the headaches. But if you overpolish it, you in deep $#!+ and can't get the satin appearance back, and if you get a sizeable dent, the satin will still show the repair, where a good shiny silverplate may actually be able to cover it.

I have a satin silver finish horn (King 2341) and a bright silver finish horn (Besson 983) that I use regularly. The satin silver finish looks much better much longer than the bright silver and takes less regular polishing to stay looking good. As Matt said, cleaning the satin silver can leave residue if you use the wrong stuff, but even that eventually wears off and the finish stays looking good.