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An empty can of beer in a sousa ... didn't seem to affect the playability of the instrument, which surprised me ...

At my school there is a legend passed down through many generations of tuba players that someone once took home a sousa then after not practicing all summer the player returned to the school and noticed a terrible stench coming out of the sousa. When band camp started up he tried playing the sousa it was really stuffy and could not get a sound to come out of it so he went to the director (not the current one we have) and he turned to over and reached in the bell. Out came a dead half decayed cat that the tuba player had thought had ran away.

I'm resurrecting this thread because I have something to add! I was working on my helicon and finally dislodged what was making it so stuffy:

These are interesting stories of things being thrown/stuck in large-bell instruments. If a player is working around crowds where a few playful, misguided, drunk people are nearby, wouldn't it be prudent to have some sort of netting material over the bell?

Ace

At one point I thought I remembered there being a product that was a mesh circle about 4-5 inches in diameter you could put down inside the sousaphone a ways to prevent stuff from getting very far.

Saxophyte’s tooth find may take the cake. At one time, for me, it was a glass Dr Pepper bottle. I still have it. Since then, however, I found the head of a sledgehammer in one tuba (I was really hoping it was a tuba sized dent tools), and the type of hard-wired electronic wall-mounted dial timer that you find in old hotel bathrooms with a heat lamp, and also on some hot tubs. It had about 6 feet of wire still attached. That’s probably the most unusual for me.

Tubajug wrote:I'm resurrecting this thread because I have something to add! I was working on my helicon and finally dislodged what was making it so stuffy:

That’s awesome

I recently got my 14k sousa back from dent work on the outer bows. I do most of my own repair work, but for things I cannot do I will send out to a good tech. Anyway, early on in the dent work, they found an obstruction in the bottom bow, and the dent ball would not pass. So they had to actually unsolder the bell elbow/ large bow section from the bottom bow. There was a full snare drum stick jammed in the bottom bow. Some damn kid back in the day obviously thought it would be funny to throw the stick into the sousa Glad the dents were taken out, along with that drum stick

Back in high school, kids would throw stuff in our sousas -- pencils, gum wrappers, even soda bottles. One day I picked up my sousa and it played and sounded really stuffy. So I looked down in the bell elbow section and saw a small umbrella used by the colorgaurd. I was pissed, so I just pulled it out and threw it clear across the band room They never bothered doing that again.....