How beat-up are your tubas?

[MikeW]

I read an article somewhere by Ren Schilke in which he mentioned that adjusting the taper of an instrument at a node-point by as little as one thousandth of an inch can sometimes have a significant affect on intonation. I guess this means that the tuning of any note that has a node at the position of a dent would be noticeably affected, which explains anecdotes about dents that magically fix problems, and others about small dents that make the instrument unplayable. By the same reasoning, a dent somewhere that doesn't happen to be a node for any note might have very little effect. It also seems a fair bet that dents get more significant as they get nearer the mouthpiece (I know that a tiny dent in the shank of my mouthpiece killed it, big-time).

My own experience is that my tuba got dented when the catch on my sling slipped, and I dropped the instrument. The resulting dent on the bottom bow didn't seem to affect playability, but every time my hand encountered the dent it gave me a nasty jolt of guilt, so eventually I had it fixed. A month or so later (at the same venue, as it happens) the 'flu caught up with me and I blacked out, so the tuba fell off my knee and picked up another noticeable dent, at the other end of the bottom bow; once again, the dent doesn't seem to affect my playing, but it nags at my conscience. Would fixing the new dent be a challenge to the tuba gods ?