Drip

There’s a special hour in the dying of each day, when the sun pauses in its saundering stride to the horizon, and turns around to look back on the world it’s leaving, as if to promise its return. That’s the quietly magic moment where the trees are framed in gold and the clouds break into their last song as notes of color streak the sky before the impending night. It’s in that hour, that moment of sunset, that instant when the day is done but not finished, that time freezes. The steady ticking, though sometimes a trickle and sometimes a roaring rush, is in that moment, completely in your hands. You can hold your breath, and with every bit that leaks out, feel a drop go by. But the plasticity of time is not a uniform layer. It’s sometimes thick and heavy, like winter wool on the whitest of days. Other times, it’s as light as summer dew and seems to disappear before your eyes. Those who are old are blanketed with time, carrying the weight of their world on their bent backs and heavy hearts, the wrinkles of age filled with their memories of love and loss. The infants, on the other hand, fight time with all their strength. They flail and kick their legs and scream their pink faces, but in the end find themselves tempered by its swaddling. They grow up under the weight of all these layers pressing down, grounding them to a world they were not always bound, what we call reality. Time is measured by the ticking of clocks and the slow pulses of waves, but it is not kept by these contraptions and devices. They simply mark its passing. No, time is only kept by us, those who hold our breaths at the close of each day, and feel the drip. Drip. Drip. 

Seraphinoff Trumpet Making Workshop

This past week I've had the opportunity to attend a trumpet making workshop in Bloomington, Indiana. The class is centered around using Baroque period techniques to make a period instrument. 

To begin, everyone started with a few sheets of brass that had been cut to a template.

The first thing we made was the tubing. This is done by taking a rectangular sheet of metal and annealing it, then bending it over a steel rod and working it with a wooden mallet until the edges come together. In this picture, the camera decided to focus on my shoe instead of the tubing. 

Then it's soldered together with a torch and silver solder. We made a total of 4 Lengths of tubing this way. 

After soldering, the tubes are burnished on the steel rod to make it hard. They are also forced through a drawplate to finalize the outside diameter. 

Heating the raw brass to such a high temperature oxidizes it, so after the initial annealing and subsequent soldering, the lengths came out rather ugly and needed to be polished.

However, a poorly soldered seam is a poorly soldered seam, which no amount of polishing can fix. 

The bell section came next, and it too was bent over the metal rod. However, the section of the bell that flared was first feathered, then teeth were cut into it to form an interlocking seam which would be much stronger than the butt joints we used on the tubing.  

This was also silver soldered.

The bell then needed to be worked into shape, which was done mostly on the anvil and mandrel. Here's a picture of Bob looking skeptically at our handiwork. 

For the bell to flare out to where it should be, it needed to be pounded on the horn of the anvil. While very ductile, doing this to brass hardens it to where it's unworkable so it needed to be re-annealed every few passes. 

The shape of the bell largely came from burnishing it against a steel mandrel, which really gave it its shape. this is done by sliding the bell onto the mandrel and with a large, heavy, steel rod, just rubbing the living daylights out of it. 

At this stage, the seam has been pounded flat to be the same thickness as the rest of the bell, but the toothed seam is still visible. 

The rule with this is to burnish until you think you're done, then burnish some more. 

Eventually, the bell conforms to the shape of the mandrel, and needs to be polished up. The hammering leaves marks that are very difficult to remove.

The next piece we made was the garland. It reinforces the bell and holds the bead. It begins as a sheet of brass like this. 

And can often end up quite ornate. Here's one that Bob engraved. 

This also needs to take the shape of the bell. So after being soldered closed,  it is burnished on the mandrel. In this case, with great violence by Michael and Rick. 

Here's a dry fit of how the bead and the garland, bead, and ball go on the bell. I decided to file grooves along the radius of my bead, which both took forever and looked awesome.  

The ball is another period decoration that we made. According to Rick, no one knows what function it serves, but every instrument from that era had one, I decided to make mine a little more unique, so after soldering it I filed little facets into it instead of polishing it smooth. 

The garland, bead, and ball are all really more decorative than strictly functional, and at this point I was far enough ahead on my work to have a lot of spare time to work on my garland. I decided to do a sheetmetal working technique called chasing repousse, which is done by raising material in certain places and "chasing" it in to define the desired shape. I decided to do a music staff going around the bell. Here's a roughed out treble clef. 

Around this time, I realized how long it would actually take me to complete this, and the instructors were kind enough to let me borrow the tools I needed to finish in my hotel room. After about 8 cumulative hours, I finally finished.

I really need to mention here my gratitude at Michael's expertise of instrument making. Given the nature of the piece, this garland couldn't be fitted to the bell like the others were. however, he made it work. 

Over time, troughs in the design darkened and the notes and the staff really started to stand out.

The garland is crimped down around the rim of the bell.

Some of the tubes that we made needed to be bent to form the crooks, and that is done by filling it with Wood's metal, an alloy with a melting point lower than water's boiling tempreture, and bending on this jig, then burnished for hardness and final shape.   

And with that, all that was left to do was the cut the tubing to length, make end joints, and start putting them together. 

Once assembled, the tubes are bound with vivacious cordage around a block of wood, and the trumpet is completed. 

I found it ironic that we had gone through all this trouble of doing everything by hand, including polishing literally every bit of the trumpet with a 10 inch polishing wheel sitting on a table where we worked, but then decide use synthetic cordage.

  

I had gotten to the end and on the last day, realized that I hadn't put my maker's mark anywhere on the trumpet. This is unacceptable. Anyone could mistake it for theirs! I thought about doing it as an engraving on the bell, but decided against it, with the relief of the repousse, it wouldn't stand out as much as I would have liked. I decided to do another repousse piece to fit on the bell. A friend of mine in the class wanted one for his bell to, so I obliged. They were soldered on.

   

Thank you to the instructors Richard Seraphinoff, Robert Barclay, and Michael Münkwitz, as well as everyone in the class who made it as splendid an experience as it was.