The Fixer

The best advice serious professional trombone players give regarding storing your horns goes something like this:

I have never seen a trombone damaged by falling from inside its case.

In other words, the finest trombone stands on the market today are less safe than putting your horn away whenever you are not holding it.

But, I play them a lot less if I have to open the case, put them together, then reverse the process when I’m done tootin’ around.

Here is my compromise.

They are there for ready access and reasonably secure. Yeah, a 9.2 earthquake would […]

I continue to enjoy working with the pickup truck full of oak flooring I salvaged out of Missoula for a hundred bucks or so (as I vaguely remember).

I was lucky as all-get-out that I tripped over a great deal on a plastic imitation-snap-together hardwood flooring closeout before I put two months of tedious, dirty labor into making my studio floor out of the real stuff.

I fabricated a metal bar into a fixture to scrape the tongues and grooves back and forth cleaning them up so they would mate together again. I glue, then clamp them together into […]