Valve Guides

[2baGuy!]

My valve guides have worn down and I need to repair them. Does anyone know where I can get some new ones?

[Tom Waid]

Try this place.

[windshieldbug]

Try using these guys
(boy, am I a smart @ss!)

[Chris]

When I needed to replace the plastic valve guides on a 4/4 Nirschl, I called Matt Walters at Dillon Music. 732.634.3399

He knew exactly what I needed and shipped them to me, I think they were $3.00 a guide.

Matt and Dillon Music are two of the best resources any brass player could ever have. Call him, tell him your horn and what you're looking for, and he'll know.

Best,
--Chris

[J.c. Sherman]

I happen to loathe plastic guides - too expensive and unreliable. Does anyone know if there are metal options for the metric tubas (mine is a Kalison DS CC)? Or am I gonna have to tap in some King guides?

Thanks!

J.c.S.

[Art Hovey]

I make my own valve guides by carefully filing down brass or stainless-steel screws which can be found with appropriate metric threads in any good hardware store. I just take one of the old valve guides with me to the store, find a nut that fits it, and then buy some screws with the same size and thread as the nut. I put the screw into a small vise between two popsicle sticks, and start filing. (A dremel tool can speed the process up, but it can be done all by hand.) I use a vernier caliper to check the width and thickness of the guide, and when it gets close to the right size I test-fit it several times. It takes some patience, but it ain't rocket surgery. If you file away too much you just start over with a new screw; they only cost a few cents each. When a new stainless valve guide fits right it is just as quiet as nylon. Metal valve guides only become noisy when they are worn down so that the piston has a lot of rotational freedom; the stainless steel guides wear down very slowly. Brass is easier to work with, but wears more quickly.

[Dan Schultz]

...... the stainless steel guides wear down very slowly. Brass is easier to work with, but wears more quickly.

The nature of things rubbing against each other is that SOMETHING is going to wear out. If I have my druthers, I would prefer to cast the majority of that wear onto the guide and not the casing slot. It's quite true that plastic valve guides wear much faster than brass ones but they are so easy to replace it's hardly a problem. I buy cheese-head nylon machine screws from McMaster-Carr. The heads are large enough to get a good trim. The plastic threads are forgiving enough that the diameter and pitch don't have to match perfectly... in the case of some of those weird threads. I'll put them into customer horns only by specific request but I use them on all of my personal piston horns.

[Art Hovey]

Of course it's true that something is going to wear. But the wear on the casing slot is spread out over more than ten times as much surface area as on the valve guides. I have only been using stainless steel for about five years, but I have not yet seen any measureable wear in the slots. Some of the stainless valve guides do show some wear, but it's not yet enough to bother me. Some casing slots are a little bit rough when they come from the factory, and they wear out plastic valve guides pretty rapidly. I think that using a stainless valve guide for a while can smooth off the slot, solving that problem.

[Dan Schultz]

..... Some casing slots are a little bit rough when they come from the factory, and they wear out plastic valve guides pretty rapidly....

You're certainly right there! I like to take a rifler file and smooth out those nasty guide slots during the first service on just about any new piston horn. This is one of the severe short-comings of some of the stuff coming out of China. It's amazing what a difference smoothing up those rough parts can make on valve action. I also think it's important that the key be as thick as possible in order to engage as deeply into the slot as possible.