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tyrell1111 wrote:I had St. Petersburg 202Ns throughout my high school career. I have absolutely no complaints about them! Easy maintenance and a fairly low price too. The worst part was making sure they looked nice for concerts because the silver plating got really fingerprint-y, but you can get them in a lacquer finish too. Other than the polishing, they were solid horns!

TubaTinker wrote:

tyrell1111 wrote:I had St. Petersburg 202Ns throughout my high school career. I have absolutely no complaints about them! Easy maintenance and a fairly low price too. The worst part was making sure they looked nice for concerts because the silver plating got really fingerprint-y, but you can get them in a lacquer finish too. Other than the polishing, they were solid horns!

That wasn't silver. Those horns are nickel plated and tend to darken to a flat grey finish when exposed to some body chemistries. Silver polish won't work. You have to be very aggressive with a buffer and chrome polish (like is used on auto and truck bumpers).

bloke wrote:King...no-brainer.

If not the budget for either King or Yamaha, the Eastman knock-off of the King.

bloke wrote:King...no-brainer.
If not the budget for either King or Yamaha, the Eastman knock-off of the King.

bisontuba wrote:IMHO, to this day, I still do not understand why piston valve instruments aimed at the school market for front action pistons horns do not have a bar--just like the 4th piston on compensating euphoniums--to swing over to depress all 3 or 4 pistons for protection while not in use. It would save schools a lot of money in repair cost and repair techs a lot less horrors to fix.

Mark wrote:

bisontuba wrote:IMHO, to this day, I still do not understand why piston valve instruments aimed at the school market for front action pistons horns do not have a bar--just like the 4th piston on compensating euphoniums--to swing over to depress all 3 or 4 pistons for protection while not in use. It would save schools a lot of money in repair cost and repair techs a lot less horrors to fix.

Do you really think most students would actually engage this protection?

russiantuba wrote:We had a bunch of Miraphone 186 models when I was in middle school and high school....some had been around since the 1970s. Why was this so?

Each year, we had to get parents to sign a contract, I can't remember if that was the form we had to get notarized, stating that the student and parents were responsible for the horn, including damages that are beyond normal wear. There was only one tuba that was badly damaged at the middle school and that was when I was in high school, and the student had to pay. Some of the older sousaphones were falling apart and we ended up threatening to have to pay for the repairs, but the repair man backed up that it was normal wear. The contracts even stated that if repairs weren't done by the parent, they would be billed, effecting graduation.

My district was very strict about this to graduate. If we didn't turn in the horn, just like a book, we didn't graduate. It was that simple. We had a student not return a tuba that moved to another district, and the district recovered it and used the contract as a result.

What still baffles me is why other schools in other states won't do similar things. I think something that would decrease the growing entitlement of the youth these days is making them responsible for their actions, along with their parents. Severely bang up a horn, you pay. If you don't pay, you don't graduate.

Curmudgeon wrote:6 weeks into the school year, I have several instruments in line right now from a "poor" school. The underprivileged youths at the school beat the backs of the valve casing with mouthpieces as to not have to play in band so they could goof around instead. The first tuba was no longer worth repairing as there is so much damage. That one tuba would consume more than the school's small entire yearly repair budget. It will salvaged out to be used for parts.

I'm sure their overwhelmed band teacher's threat of "lowered grades" will worry these darlings.

Getting reimbursement from the absentee parents will, I'm sure, be swift.

bloke wrote:

bisontuba wrote:Times have changed...sigh..

yes...but you consider this "good" whereas I consider it "bad", and you deny that this ( https://www.google.com/search?q=LBJ+great+society ) is one of the primary causes, where as you will point to it as one of the primary solutions.

I won't say more specifically about that, but it should be obvious to all (who have a perspective that reaches back prior to the beginning of all of that) that ever since these programs were put in place (hour-after-hour/day-after-day/week-after-week/year-after-year/decade-after-decade) society has greatly deteriorated, and only those in the very top of government (as government has expanded in scope and size many-fold), and those at the very top of the private sector have benefited. Nearly everyone else has suffered, and there can no longer be any such thing (particularly in population-dense areas) of telling one's children to "go outside and play".

Most people here know the very nice and capable tuba professor at the U of Memphis. Yesterday, a Memphis cop was killed in a very "nice-looking" subdivision not far at all from his home. This sort of Sh!t simply did not happen prior to [what is linked to, above], which - imho - was intentionally put in place (along with many other things that have been put in place) to create chaos...and we now certainly have chaos.

bloke "have a teaching certificate, have never used it, will never use it, and pray every day for those who use theirs"