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I am curious what would be a good way to approach learning to fabricate and build an instrument like a tuba.

- Where does one acquire raw materials?
- What kinds of tools do you need?
- Are there any documented resources for learning the art?
- Who can teach you how to do it?

I fully appreciate the considerable skill and lifetime of experience that goes into making and modifying brass instruments. I also realize how vague and catch-all my questions are. At this point I am just curious about the process from start to finish, but who knows where that could lead. The mind is a terrible thing...

This may not be what you are looking for, but Jon Sass provides a short factory tour of the B&S factory in Germany, showing how a tuba is made from start to finish.

The link for part 1 is http://www.youtube.com/user/bandsbrass# ... C9nrP7Mr7g

The first person that popped into my mind is Sam Gnagey. He's known for making great Frankenhorns, so he probably has tons of great insight into what does and does not work when putting together a horn.

Carl Kleinstuber published an article in the TUBA Journal some years ago, describing some real fabrication, including making and bending tapered brass tubing. He used to have a website describing his work, but it seems to have disappeared.

Pete Zuhoski on Long Island recently sent me this link:

http://podcast.open.ac.uk/oulearn/arts- ... struments#

Among other things, it describes the construction of a baroque trumpet, starting with sheet metal. Very interesting stuff.

I don't mean to be negative, but building a Tuba from scratch (raw materials) would be quite an affair. You would need loads of industrial equipment which would cost thousands upon thousands of dollars.

That being said, you can buy parts already constructed and build the horn out of parts. You can buy parts from repair techs who can order them for you, but it won't be cheap. Building a Tuba from parts, if you could get them all new, would probably cost considerably more than a new horn that is already put together.

A third option is to build (as someone previously mentioned) a franken-Tuba out of used parts or horns that have been scrapped for parts.

There are many great videos online about manufacturing. If you visit Youtube, there is a clip from How It's Made where they show you how they make the King 2341 Tuba.

Dave Detwiler wrote:This may not be what you are looking for, but Jon Sass provides a short factory tour of the B&S factory in Germany, showing how a tuba is made from start to finish.

The link for part 1 is http://www.youtube.com/user/bandsbrass# ... C9nrP7Mr7g

Very interesting, because when I visited B&S they would not let me as much as take picture within the factory in case of giving away manufacturing secrets to competitors

I have a good friend who has a custom trumpet shop. He buys valve blocks from a manufacturer somewhere in Germany and also uses pre-formed 1st, 2nd and 3rd slide crooks. He bends his own bell crooks and main tuning slide crooks and makes the custom bracing.


Matt Walters builds a custom CC Tuba for Dillon. Does anyone have a quick link to that thread?

There is a fascinating section of the podcast posted by Art in which Bob Barclay hosts a group of people for a week and teaches them how to make their own natural trumpets. Will Scarlett from the CSO was there.

I for one would very much be interested in such a program for the tuba and would be willing to take the time off and pony up for the raw materials just to have the experience. Maybe some of the components could be prefabricated (like the valves) to make things a bit easier.

Very much enjoyed the videos. Absolutely destroyed my ability to get real work done today.

I took the weeklong natural trumpet making class presented by Bob Barclay and Richard Seraphinoff in Indiana a few years back. I enjoyed it tremendously and learned a lot, but it was an awful lot of hard work! I was exhausted after each day, sweaty, had black gunk caked all over my hands, had cuts, burns, etc.. Now a historic instrument like that's bell is hand-chased, not spun, and you build up tubing from flat sheets rather than pre-formed tubing, and those things take longer than making a modern instrument AND in that class you don't use any power tools, however, you're still talking about a renaissance-style trumpet only needing two bends total. It's so much less work than making a tuba it is not even possible to compare.

A lot of the smaller (and even some of the bigger) german companies that make tubas buy bells and valve sets from outside suppliers. Say you were to do that. You'd still need tooling to make the conical tubing and bows and branches. This steel tooling might cost you thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to have made. Then you would need a lot of special tools. Even once you had all this stuff, it might take you many hundreds of hours to make all the parts and put it all together. It's not something you'd be able to do in a week-long workshop!

By the way, the natural trumpet making workshop you see in the video is a GREAT experience and is really a bargain for what it costs! I highly recommend it.

http://www.seraphinoff.com/naturaltrumpet.htm

KiltieTuba wrote:As I understand it, to learn how to make instruments one has to apprentice under a master. There aren't too many shops in the US that do fabrication out of sheets and simple metals, most of them are like Conn Selmer or the Chinese, not sure on Kanstul - pretty sure they are the closest you could find to learning how to do this - in the US.

Of course a lot these places make more smaller instruments than they do tubas, so if you are starting out building something, you'll likely spend the majority of your time on smaller instruments.

What do you mean "like Conn Selmer or the Chinese?" I don't quite understand. You have to use sheet metal to make Tuba branches and bells. I don't think there is any other way around it.

If you mean a type of shop where one person builds valve blocks, one person makes bells, one person works in bending, that I understand.

I found this link on Trumpet Master- It is a factory tour of the Zeus Guarnerius Factory. These images show what is involved in manufacturing Trumpets.

For Tuba, imagine this on a far larger scale. Note all of the tooling involved.

http://zacharymusic.com/Zachary_Music/Factory.htm

Here is another -

...and another

... and yet another

Conn - Selmer video...

A news story about Conn-Selmer

"sheets and sheets of raw brass..."

Here is how they do it in France at Selmer-Paris

David Monette's shop - VERY high end Trumpets -

Now Japan - Yamaha part 1 and 2