| I didn't attend a repair school. I learned repair in the late 1970's from an old guy, Peg Meyer who was trained by Conn in the 1920's. I worked for him for several years before I started out on my own.
Peg used to use the term "work hardened". He said that the spots of the metal where the work was doe got harder than the rest of the piece. He said that you could fix this by re-annealing (-5 points for bad spelling) the piece to return the molecular structure to the way it was. Seems like a lot of trouble when you can replace the piece.
On a silver horn, I can usually get the dent out to the point that it is very difficult to tell where it was. It helps that you can buff up the silver on a plated horn. On a lacquer horn, the lacquer will crinkle up and get "cracked glass" look to it. If you remove the old lacquer and relacquer it you can't tell where the dent was. You still have the underlying problem of "work hardening" and the sound of the instrument can be affected.
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"Music is a fire in your belly that has to come out of your mouth, so you'd better put a horn in the way before someone gets hurt" (paraphrase of Bleeding Gums Murphy) |