How Much Silver....

[k001k47]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okay

maybe it's a really good one

[royjohn]

I have a 1913 Keefer Eb that is pretty similar to this. . .Keefer took over the factory from Distin and bought the business. I am no expert, but I think mine plays pretty well. When I talked about getting rid of it in favor of something else in a thread here a good while ago, I was advised to keep it. I did not pay near the asking price of $895 for mine and mine is fairly dent free. I would suspect a decent price for this would be in the $200 to $300 range at the very most. There are a lot of old Ebs out there and this one would require a lot of dent work to look good. Not that much demand for them, either.

As far as the silver plate question, something like this came up on Trumpet Herald recently when someone asked about the amount of gold to plate a trumpet. I actually did some calculations and came up with about an ounce of gold. I can't remember the exact thickness I used to calculate, but it was somewhere between 0.0005" and 0.0015". I'm surprised that the standard thickness at one point was less than 0.001", but that could be. It would not be that difficult to approximate the surface area of a tuba, The area from the bell back to the valves could be modeled as one big cone and there is an easy formula for the surface area of the cone minus the base. Then you would just measure how much cylindrical tubing there is in the valves and leadpipe and make a calculation for the valve casing cylinders and. . . voila! The weight of a cubic inch of silver is easily available at various sites.

Based on one ounce to plate a trumpet, twelve ounces to plate a tuba sounds like it is in the ball park. The charge to plate a trumpet in gold is about the price of an ounce of gold and then they probably plate on half to three quarters of an ounce, with the rest as a fee. Silver has taken a tumble since a year or two ago and is now around $20/oz. So the cost of the silver to plate a tuba would be about $240. I would assume you might have to take the tuba apart to do a good job, IDK? So the cost to actually plate it could be much more. Certainly the buffing and dent removal would be. The people at Anderson's are very helpful and they will patch you right in to the guy in the plating room if you have a technical question. . .they did that for me once. I'm sure they could give you a ballpark figure for plating or for prep and plating, as I understand they do it all there.

I have written with comments to sellers using the question feature and offering a price if it doesn't sell. It seems everyone thinks they have a bonanza and an antique, so if you can point them towards a realistic valuation, you might get some cooperation. You might have to point out the differences between their banged up horn and the completed listing that sold for $1000 . . . hope this helps . . .

[ghmerrill]

Some brands during some time periods used tons of silver to cover imperfections... kind of like a coat of paint.

That old Buescher catalog of mine (1909) shows their instruments available in three grades: single, double, and triple silver plating.

[Bandmaster]

A couple years ago, after I got my gold plated Conn 38K and posted photos of it here, we had the discussion about how much gold it would take plate that sousaphone. At that time, it was the consensus that it take somewhere around 4 ounces of gold to plate the horn. Me personally, I have no idea what it would really take! I have no experience in the electro-plating industry. The only thing I have heard is that in the old days they plated in silver much thicker than they do today, and that would have been thicker than any gold plating that they would have done. Whatever that means...