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Old enough to have S-links and a smaller bell, but new enough to not have the funny M shaped 4th valve tuning slide? Or am I putting too much meaning in that weird tuning slide?

The 4th valve wrap is too short on most of the Miraphone 186 tubas and there is not enough room to add a longer 4th slide. I'm built several 'M-shaped' slides to give extra length to the slide. It's pretty simple to do if you have two more crooks and some inner tubing. I'll dig around and see if I can find an image.

Maybe is was a custom slide because somebody thought it was too short. It's a little awkward. The serial suggests the tuba is from 1965, and the recording bell says Mirafone, so I assume it was intended for the US market.

I may have overhauled the tuba in question and sold it to The University of Texas in 2014. If it's the one... it left here with a Chinese bell and probably would have an eight-digit date code, the original serial number, and my initials (DWS) stamped into the paddle bar.

Edit: Not the same horn. I see the one in the Ebay listing has a bell garland. Anyway... I KNOW that there are several of these oddballs around. And... I would not have gone to the effort to make the 4th slide longer if it wasn't absolutely necessary. Lots of folks don't even know what the 4th valve is used for!

the elephant wrote:

Dan Schultz wrote:The 4th valve wrap is too short on most of the Miraphone 186 tubas and there is not enough room to add a longer 4th slide. I'm built several 'M-shaped' slides to give extra length to the slide. It's pretty simple to do if you have two more crooks and some inner tubing. I'll dig around and see if I can find an image.

I know about that. He implied that the factory made these and that you could date the era of production based on that. I don't know whether he meant to do that, but that is what he typed.

Yes, I did mean to imply that you could date era of production, since I didn't know that they were never produced that way. Thanks, Dan, for the explanation. Seems like mine was corrected long before it ever got to me, and I'm happy with the alteration.

Do C 186s have long enough 4th valve circuits?