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CUPRONICKEL - similar to nickel silver but with little or no zinc?

Where's a "like" button for Wade's post!!!

Nickel silver contains 18 - 20% nickel, 60 - 65% copper, and 17 - 20% zinc.
Nickel silver is very resistant to stress, corrosion and cracking. Nickel silver responds and adapts to changing sound frequencies faster than other metals, creating a well centered and extremely powerful sound.

Yellow brass is about 67% copper and 33% zinc.
Gold brass is roughly 85% copper and 15% zinc.

I have a Sterling euphonium, and surprisingly, the entire horn is Nickel Silver, except for the bell, which I think is rose/gold brass. I didn't realize this until I went to clean the tuning slides,and realized that everything in them is nickel silver, even the end bows. They are silver plated so it's hard to tell. Also the venerable Conn 8D French horn, and a lot of other pro-level horns, are made entirely of N/S alloy.

Trombone inner slide tubes these days are almost entirely Chrome-Plated Nickel-Silver alloy. Outer slides vary, but quite a few horns. like the King 2b 3b 4b etc , use nickel silver outer slide tubes.

With German-style trombones, it seems most of them made these days are Red Brass and German Silver, such as those made by Voigt. The Kuhn & Hoyer trombones also favor that kind of construction.

Sorry about the Tangent, but Nickel Silver, or whatever you call it, is a great "tone metal".

I played a ~1877 Lehnert Eb contrabass saxhorn for several years in the Georgia 8th Regiment Band, and it was completely made of nickel silver (except for valve strings and bumpers). It had a HUGE, dark sound and good intonation, far better than most horns of its type. Unfortunately, it had cracks all over it and some valve alignment problems. Lee Stofer took care of fixing the valves and patching the cracks and did a superb job. He has a love of restoring antique horns. It already sounded good, but when we got it back, the sound was amazing for an instrument more than a century and a third old. None of our brass basses had that depth of sound, and I attribute much of it to the metal.

Woah, wait . . . But what about Nickelback?
It has no brass but definitely has a silver side up!
*confused about all this Canadian fusion alloy stuff*

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To the above question regarding this quote: "a well-centered and extremely powerful sound."
German instrument maker, Schreiber & Keilwerth - researched for the article I wrote for the ITEA 2012 Winter Journal entitled, Sound Legacy.

tbonesullivan wrote:I have a Sterling euphonium, and surprisingly, the entire horn is Nickel Silver, except for the bell, which I think is rose/gold brass.

Which model of Sterling? I have a Perantucci I got off ebay I don't know how long ago. Pretty sure it's pre-Virtuoso. Nice sound, very in tune with itself, bell appears to be same metal. Slides also appear "silver." So wondering how it compares with yours.

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MaryAnn wrote:Which model of Sterling? I have a Perantucci I got off ebay I don't know how long ago. Pretty sure it's pre-Virtuoso. Nice sound, very in tune with itself, bell appears to be same metal. Slides also appear "silver." So wondering how it compares with yours.

It's a Perantucci branded 1065HGS. I've been told that the H means Heavy bell, and the G means red brass bell. It's silver plated on the inside of the bell pretty far, so I can't see the underlying metal. It's a good horn, but mine was apparently subjected to junior school and high school band, so it does have a some dings and issues. I need to get the mouthpiece receiver re-aligned, as it looks like it was tweaked at some point.

YORK-aholic wrote:Question about nickel silver:

Will it tarnish if left unlacquered? if so, similar tarnishing to silverplate or is it faster/slower?

Thank you.

Silver tarnishes to black--silver oxide is black. (It's the black in traditional black-and-white photographs, too.)

Nickel silver, German silver, etc., contain no silver and therefore won't have silver oxide in their tarnish products. In my experience, the patina becomes gray and loses its shine at about the same rate as brass.

For brass, it depends on the presence of electrolytes. Electrolytes can leach out copper and cause it to oxidize directly, which becomes green. Look at the eventual color of sweat stains on a raw brass tuba, for example, or the stains they leave on shirt sleeves that are damp with sweat. Sweat is salty and a good electrolyte. Without the electrolytes, brass turns brown, the exact shade of which varies with how long it takes to form the patina, whether there is any acid (particularly sulfuric acid present in acid rain in areas near a coal-fired power plant) present during the patina process, and the exact alloy of copper and zinc.

Gold does not tarnish, but gold is nearly always an alloy, and the alloy products can oxidize a bit. Gold can also get dirty.

Rick "polishing gold plating frequently is a very quick way to make it no longer gold-plated" Denney