Day Ten: Epic of the hundred brass dongles! (I got a better eval today!)

Today I was vindicated when my instructor told me that he had noticed my increased effort to stay focused and awake. While my eval scores are still just above tragic, they are a note better than before. Before, I was ready to flunk the course by the end of five weeks, when the hammer falls. With these scores, I might actually be able to make it. If this were a classroom setting, I would have gone from a D- to a C.

And though C is passing (probably) I would like to get a better eval next time.

Today was my last day of crash course reeds/woodwinds. I tied up all the loose ends and then headed over to the buffing room.

Buffing keys and parts is one of the most transformative things that one can do to a metal object. They go from dirty and tarnished to bright, shiny, and clean.

"Buffing" is the act of using cloth and a special compound to strip away a tiny layer of metal, removing the tarnish and creating a shine that catches the eye.

Careful! Too much buffing can leave your instrument dangerously thin! I heard a story where the guys screwed up too many times during a lacquering job and the guys in buffing tore through the bell! It was a customer horn, too!

Explanation of customer horns. The place I am getting my schooling is what is known as an "overhaul shop." The owner buys large quantities of diseased and desiccated instruments at low prices and then flips them and sells them to shops as rental instruments. Since the quality standard for these horns is not stringent, they are what most starting students work on before they acquire the ability needed to, well, not break things when working on the more important "customer horns." If a professional computer repair place returned your computer with a fried motherboard that wasn't there before, rendering the device destroyed or useless, how would you feel?

These "overhaul" horns are designated with a moniker that takes a piece from the name of the shop. Since I want to preserve a little bit of privacy, I will say that it is an animal. I will refer to them as "animal horns" from now on.

My first introduction to buffing was this:

Guess what those are?

Dongles. I think. Truth be told, I have absolutely no clue what these things are. That paper down there in the lower-left corner told me that there are one hundred (and one) of them.

It takes about five minutes to buff a dongle. They come out looking like theses boys here.

The ones on the right. Noticeably shinier, right?

Ya! That's my hard work right there!

I racked up a considerable number of these during the day.

One thing you have to watch for when buffing is losing control of the piece. If you let your concentration slip, the wheel pulls the piece out from under you and sends it flying across the room. Most often this results in dents and broken things. I think the majority of my instrument repair mishaps had to do with buffing wheels.

Anyways, I'll be buffing all of tomorrow (8 hours) and hopefully won't have to dive too deep ...

The thing that scares me most is the fact that I am going to have to spend four whole weeks doing just this. It's boring as hell! It's the most monotonous part of the whole gig! Gah, I hope those four weeks don't come soon.