Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

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Matt Walters
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Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by Matt Walters »

The piston valves on my tubas always work smoother and faster........ AFTER I OIL them. I've noticed this regardless of the brand of oil. So....I oil my valves (with whatever free oil was left behind) before I start playing.
Now I need to find a way without resorting to hours and hours of intelligent practice to make my fingers work smoother and faster.
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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by Bnich93 »

Interestingly enough I have a similar experience with slide greases. When I apply a lubricant to moving parts they seem to then move on my command. I too use the special ingredient of whatever is nearby and inexpensive.
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bort
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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by bort »

Matt Walters wrote:Now I need to find a way without resorting to hours and hours of intelligent practice to make my fingers work smoother and faster.
Naturally, you should try oiling your fingers before you play. Worked for the valves! :P
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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by SousaWarrior9 »

Nah, for my valves, I just spit on 'em and hope for the best :tuba:
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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by Awegner2 »

Matt, I couldn't agree more. I oil my valves religiously and grease my slides on a regular basis. Any mechanical component needs lubricant to last an appreciable amount of time. Per my other thread:

Is it silly to try to save a few dollars on valve oil when you spend 10K on a horn? Yes. Is it necessary to go to leaps and bounds and do special things to make your horn more airtight*? No. However, I do feel that what I did made a difference for me, and I wanted to share my experience here with the folks on TubeNet. My engineer tendencies make me overthink literally everything. I'm not trying to blow smoke, I just wanted to share what I believed to work well for me with my horn. Everyone's mileage varies and companies like Hetman and Al Cass know more about valve oil than I could ever hope to. I just like to try new things.
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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by Donn »

bloke wrote: I could splurge for a $7 bottle of Lucas, and add a couple of drops.
Likely, it would last just as long (or longer) than my gallons of lamp oil. (I can only get the price down to around 15 cents an ounce if I buy TWO gallons.)
That would be an interesting and different experiment. In the previously described process, heavy oil is wiped onto the bearing surfaces and then lubricated with lighter oil. Is it the same, if the heavy oil is simply mixed in as part of the valve oil? That's how it's used automotive applications, but maybe because there the objective is a heavy constituent that lingers long enough to be there at cold start days later. So you get the product's particular effect when the lighter constituents run off. My impression, from the way they're doing it, is that the improvement to piston valve lubrication is supposed to be a heavy oil in certain places, not just evenly distributed in the valve oil - and it would have to reach those places immediately, not hours/days later. So maybe you'd be wasting your drop of heavy oil, according to the theory, though of course it would thicken the oil a bit. We owe our knowledge of these things to daring experimenters like you who are willing to take such risks.

(Though since it's actually two experiments, if you're going with Lucas, we'll need someone to compare Lucas with Hy-Per Lube.)
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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by Ken Herrick »

SousaWarrior9 wrote:Nah, for my valves, I just spit on 'em and hope for the best :tuba:
That reminds me of when I first came to Australia nearly 50 years ago and took a job in a repair shop in Sydney.
It seems that was the lubricant of choice for almost all the brass band tuba players. We had a constant stream of instruments needing valve refitting. Fortunately, while we weren't as well equiped as Anderson or Dan Oberloh, careful machining and our own plating shop made it possible to do quite a reasonable refitting job.

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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by hup_d_dup »

Matt Walters wrote:So....I oil my valves (with whatever free oil was left behind) before I start playing.
My experience is that if the pistons and casing are clean and undamaged, any valve oil works. If there is some underlying problem, you may get lucky with some mystery or exotic oil. The only oils I avoid are those that seem to leave sludge behind after time.

I don't see any problem switching between conventional and synthetic oils. I've tried to make them interfere with each other by adding both at the same time, with no adverse result.

Rather than oiling before playing, I like to oil after I'm done playing (without fail). This addresses NAPBIRT's 4th reason for oiling valves: it prevents corrosion. Staining and discoloration are incipient corrosion. Corrosion accelerates wear. Wear occurs during playing, but most corrosion occurs during the long periods between playing sessions.

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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by k001k47 »

bloke wrote:
hup_d_dup wrote:
Matt Walters wrote:So....I oil my valves (with whatever free oil was left behind) before I start playing.
My experience is that if the pistons and casing are clean and undamaged, any valve oil works. If there is some underlying problem, you may get lucky with some mystery or exotic oil. The only oils I avoid are those that seem to leave sludge behind after time.

I don't see any problem switching between conventional and synthetic oils. I've tried to make them interfere with each other by adding both at the same time, with no adverse result.

Rather than oiling before playing, I like to oil after I'm done playing (without fail). This addresses NAPBIRT's 4th reason for oiling valves: it prevents corrosion. Staining and discoloration are incipient corrosion. Corrosion accelerates wear. Wear occurs during playing, but most corrosion occurs during the long periods between playing sessions.

Hup
Jacking around with this/that/the-other oil and claiming that one works best is to discover which available-for-sale concoction lubricates smoothed-down LIME DEPOSITS the best, whereas if the lime deposits were DISSOLVED away (at a shop, with a mild acid cleaning solution), the exposed-again brass might make a bit of a hissing noise for a couple of weeks (as the lime deposits ate into the casing surface [hopefully only] a little bit), but it will no longer be "oil sensitive", because BRASS (rather than lime...basically: porous limestone) is being lubricated.
I recommend this, because the label looks cool (not to mention the fact that it is diverse and inclusive - which are always the most important considerations), and the name is cool...plus, people have been buying it for 85 years, and (just like political parties) we all know that if people have been buying stuff for a long time, it HAS to be really great.

Image
that does look cool
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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by Donn »

I hate that stuff because of the bottle - it seems to more often than average get tipped over, the stuff leaks out. [I have a smaller bottle than the one pictured above.] And the smell isn't my bag either, but the interesting thing is that there's a whiff of wintergreen in there - and wintergreen is reportedly a potent penetrating oil, better than "Liquid Wrench" or similar.
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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by Three Valves »

Wintergreen life savers. :tuba:
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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by k001k47 »

bloke wrote:bloke "I wonder what putrefied wintergreen smells (tastes?) like."
not as good as rancid bear grease
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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by Bill Troiano »

I might have posted about this in the past, but........sometime in the mid 70's, I went to see the Chicago Sym. brass section perform at Avery Fisher Hall. Amazing, of course. Then, I made my way back stage so that I could meet Arnold Jacobs. When I finally got to him, I didn't know what to say, except that I loved his playing. And, then I said, I see that you play a piston CC (most all of us back then played German rotary CC's, as manufacturers didn't get into the piston CC market yet.) He said, I like a valve that I can take out quickly and spit on it if I have to.

What's the point. I'm not sure, but spit works as a valve lubricant, but it probably doesn't last, so you would have to spit on your valve often. It's good in a pinch.

But to the point, and as others have mentioned, I don't know if it matters what oil you use, as long as the horn is clean. To obsess over certain kinds of oil, to me, well, fuggedaboddit. But, Liquid Wrench smells awful and the entire ensemble has to suffer.
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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by JCalkin »

bort wrote:
Matt Walters wrote:Now I need to find a way without resorting to hours and hours of intelligent practice to make my fingers work smoother and faster.
Naturally, you should try oiling your fingers before you play. Worked for the valves! :P
For best results, apply the lubrication to your fingers from the inside. I prefer bacon grease in the morning and a high-viscosity porter in the evening when the fingers are resting between playing sessions.
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Re: Valve Oils- My Constant Experience

Post by Three Valves »

I saw a 5 gallon can of Marvel Mystery Oil at the car show yesterday. I would have got it for you but they wanted $70 for it!!
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