Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2005-07-11 17:00
Here is a way to repair a defective pad. The idea is that it's a temporary fix, but you'd be surprised at how long you can be tempted to leave it like that....
There is a thin transparent plastic film that we call Clingfilm in UK, Domopak in Italy.....
USA....dunno.
It's used to cover things like plates of salad in the refrigerator. It comes in rolls.
You tear off a bit a couple of inches (5 cm) or a bit smaller across, slide it under the pad, pull tight and wrap it over the top of the cup.
A good feature of this solution is that the plastic stretches over the indentation in the pad that was made by the lip of the tonehole, so the seal is *very* good, and self-adjusting.
This technique can be a lifesaver on period instruments, where you're dealing with water-absorbent and labile boxwood, brass springs, leather pads and flat toneholes.
The really extreme situation where the pad disintegrates can be handled by using BluTak. (Are you sitting comfortably?)
There is a mildly adhesive chewing-gum-like substance called BluTak in UK, (Hafties in Germany....) that is often used to stick posters up on the wall, for example. (You roll a small bit of it between your fingers until it softens, put it between the poster and the wall, and then squeeze it into a disc by flattening the poster against the wall. This creates a semi-permanent attachment.)
But BluTak, combined with clingfilm, can completely replace a pad. You make the pad by wrapping a piece of BluTak in clingfilm, and then stick it into the cup with another tiny bit of BluTak. Pressing it lightly onto the tonehole completes the process. And you can almost always do all of this without removing the key.
This is particularly useful, again, with old instruments. The curator of a museum I visited once was completely astounded at how quickly I was able to get some old clarinets going temporarily, leaving them exactly as I found them at the end of my visit.
The upshot of all of this is that I always carry BluTak and Clingfilm with me in my clarinet case. I've chopped a short bit off the roll of Clingfilm so it's easy to keep in the case.
:-)
Tony
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The Clarinet BBoard
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