 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: contragirl
Date: 2004-09-06 17:27
OK, I know tenons break all the time on plastic horns in the joint. Has it ever been the case that a wooden clarinet would have a tenon break like that? I've never really heard of wooden clarinets having that kind of breakage unless someone dropped it.
It didn't happen to anyone or anything, I'm just curious.
--CG
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Author: GBK
Date: 2004-09-06 18:04
contragirl wrote:
> I've never really heard of wooden
> clarinets having that kind of breakage unless someone dropped
> it.
Or accidentally sat on it. I've seen it happen ...GBK
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Author: Don Berger
Date: 2004-09-06 18:21
Also if the corks are TOO tight, most of us will [hopefully ONLY] try slight bending at the joint's center CAREFULLY, to break loose. A slightly broken tenon may be repairable, badly broken ones may be replaced. Careful Luck, Don
Thanx, Mark, Don
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Author: JMcAulay
Date: 2004-09-07 05:45
A few months ago, my tech repaired two bell tenons that had been broken before I bought the Clarinets. Each had a big chip out, with about one-third of each tenon missing. One was plastic (Vito), the other was wood (Normandy). Both instruments played just fine with these chipped tenons, and neither seemed to be at all close to having its bell fall off.
Both were repaired using the same technique: a build-up of composition material to replace the missing chipout, followed by trim and file after it solidified, then cork replacement. About twenty bux each, thank you very much, and both worked just fine. Hardly noticeable.
My observation says young students are not at all immune to chipping bell tenons. I think it's largely due to the strange way the Clarinets are waved around by some students during assembly and disassembly.
Regards,
John
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Author: Gordon (NZ)
Date: 2004-09-07 13:11
Drop a lower section, and the chances are you will get a good chunk out of the bell tenon, which is very thin and weak. However this tenon carries very little load, and gluing the chip back in, or filling the gap in some way, is usually successful. Sometimes I insert a couple of metal pins, much the same as a dentist does when rebuilding a tooth, to add to the strength.
Chips here are unlikely to affect the way the instrument plays.
Never put a clarinet on a bed or couch. People sit on these without looking where they are sitting. If any clarinet (including timber) is sat on, then there is an excellent chance that the centre tenon will break off. If the instrument is plastic, the break is usually fairly clean across the tenon; if it is timber, then the break is usually a jagged mess because of the grain.
In either situation, the damaged tenon can be cut off, a socket made in the end of the body where the tenon was, a new section of timber or polymer grafted into the socket, and shaped to a tenon.
A low-cost fix would be simply to glue it, which is often practically invisible, and in some cases this may be secure and reliable. I have been reluctant to trust this approach.
Another option is to insert reinforcing pins, say six of them, 1.2 mm diameter and 4 cm long, inside the wall of the instrument. If the detail of this is WELL done, then the tenon can become a lot stronger that it ever was. In a few cases, after I have done this work, the instrument has been sat on again, and this time the tenon SOCKET has broken off.
Yet another approach is to glue the tenon back, turn out the bore a little larger, using a lathe, and glue in an appropriate metal tube for a couple of inches of the bore.
In most (all?) cases, transferring the keys to a replacement body, with the many likely adoptions to the keys to get accurate fitting, will be considerably more expensive.
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Author: BobD
Date: 2004-09-07 14:43
Thanks Gordon for your, as usual, excellent description. All one has to do is look at how many young players leave their horns laying on their chairs during rehearsal break to realize where the breaks come from.
"About twenty bux each,".....a real bargain!
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