Quick & Easy DIY Sax Repairs

hey better sax players today I'm gonna be showing you how to do some very easy and common repairs on saxophones these are all things you can do yourself at home I'm gonna be using this alto saxophone I bought from Amazon that I reviewed and unboxed a few weeks back each one of these jobs can be done in under 10 minutes and you can use tools and materials you probably already have in your house or stuff that costs under 10 bucks everything I need for the for repairs I'm about to show you is on the table in front of me right here let's get to it G Metcalf here with another better sax video first of all congratulations to the five winners of the Instagram contest where we gave away Legere synthetic reeds the next giveaway is coming soon it's going to be something a little bit bigger so make sure you're subscribed to the youtube channel as well as better sacks on Facebook and Instagram because that's where I'll be announcing the details of the next giveaway contest today we're gonna be doing some repairs on this alto I've got another video coming soon where I do some different repairs on the soprano that we unboxed last week I saw your comments you guys really want me to get a tenor saxophone so I went ahead and I ordered the tenor saxophone from Amazon it's on the way as soon as I get it we're gonna unbox it we're gonna do a blind test we're gonna see how it plays so keep an eye out for that [Music] before we get started I want to let you know I'm not showing you these repair tips because I want you to stop going to your repair technician not at all if you've got a repair technician near where you live that you like take your instrument to them and let them fix your horn they know what they're doing however not everyone has a repair technician local to them and some of the things I'm about to show you are really simple it's kind of silly not to do them yourself having said that there is a risk that you can do some damage to your saxophone if you mess up so keep that in mind as with learning to play the saxophone learning to repair saxophones involves making a lot of mistakes I don't want you making your mistakes on your precious valuable instrument so it's always a better idea to let the repair man who's already gone through the process of making all those mistakes fix your saxophone if you're a band director you might find some of these tips super helpful though if you have a neck cork that is too tight for your mouthpiece and this is very common on brand new saxophones it's no problem with two little pieces of sandpaper and a little bit of cork grease you could fix that in a matter of minutes we need three things some cork grease and I got two different grits of sandpaper 180 and 320 so when I got this ax ax phone the the cork was really tight for the mouthpiece that came with it as well as my mouthpiece they worked I really had to crank it on there to get it so this is a good fitting cork it's got a good resistance but it goes on and off with you know almost effortlessly but when it's in place it stays there so you want to find that exact bit of tension where it doesn't move when you don't want it to but it does come on and off easily enough it's really easy to get any cork on your saxophones to be like this and I'm going to show you how to do that this is something anybody can do when ever you're using sandpaper on a saxophone you got to be really careful that it doesn't touch if it just touches a little bit you're gonna scratch get through your your lacquer and you're not gonna be super happy about that first you want to start with the rougher the same paper okay and I would just cut a piece of this kind of wrap that on there a little bit being careful not to touch the lacquer of your saxophone wrapped it around there and just turn back and forth you're gonna get a nice even you know you go in and out a little bit you're gonna get that smooth and you could test with your mouthpiece and once it starts going on there a bit easier and you can kind of get it in and out on a dry cork no problem we're good I remember I've already done this one but I'm just showing you what I did and then I take the finer grain this is 320 but you could even go find her if you want and I do the same thing and this will smooth it out smooth out the pores of the cork a little bit and that'll get you a and even smoother fit okay so now just with no cork grease that's going on nicely the next step is to take your cork grease and now that this has just been sanded down a little bit the pores are all open you know put a nice healthy amount of Corky's on there and with your finger you're gonna rub it in and you want to get that so really soak into that cork and then work that in with your mouthpiece okay and this has a tighter fit this outside mouthpiece as you can see this is very this is a Selmer scroll shank you know it's right in the middle of the road it's not too tight not too loose and as you can see I get a great fit it doesn't move on its own but with the right amount of pressure it comes off easily it's great for adjustments but when you're playing it's not gonna be to reduce and of course it's gonna make a really good seal with the neck [Music] you may remember when I unboxed this alto sax when I bought on Amazon I said it didn't have a great fit with the neck the neck tenon didn't have a fantastic fit in the receiver part of this AXA bump so I fixed that as well it took me a matter of seconds to fix it so now we've got a decent fit but it's still tight so when I tighten up this screw this doesn't move okay so that's what you want and you want that to come out pretty smooth easily so what I did is I used some sandpaper I got this sandpaper off of Amazon it's an assortment of fine grain sandpaper for metal work or for wood finishing work it's you know you got up to like 4000 grit so it's super fine stuff I'm gonna take something just in the middle with this is like a 1200 and first I'm gonna cut myself a piece I'm gonna cut myself a strip a little bit wider than the tenon here and I'm just using this is an exacto knife I'm using you can get in any hobby store or on Amazon as well I'll link to all of this stuff all these little tools all of this sandpaper here cost me 8 bucks ok and that's like a lifetime supply for what I do alright so now I've got a little strip of that I'm gonna once again you got to be really careful you don't touch any of the lacquered parts of your horn see that I just wrapped it around the tenon and now I'm gonna just turn nice and slow get a nice even and this should smooth out any rough spots on that tenon enough to get this to fit nicely now you want to be very careful to wipe that down once you've done that so you get any little dust from that metal off you could see here like when this was made it was not they didn't do a great job you know you got lacquer on the tenon you got lacquer up here and you could also see these lines this is when I was originally putting the tanning into the receiver and turning it because there was rough spots and over time this is gonna get scratched more and more and the fit is gonna get worse and if you're if we're dealing with like a young student who might be using this they're not as careful and this is one of the things that can go wrong so you want to have a good fit if you're a teacher this is a this is a fix you can do you have to be careful and go slow don't be in a rush okay that's a decent fit and there we have it tighten that up it doesn't move and it comes out with an easy twist okay I wanted to show you one more quick and easy repair that's very common on some of these saxophones imported from China the other day I was trying one out and in the first few minutes of playing it out of the box one of the key pearls popped off it's not a big deal I mean it's they shouldn't come off but if that happens to you it's an easy fix you just need a drop literally just one drop of some superglue and that should be on there for good this is some Loctite superglue you could buy it in any supermarket for a few bucks I thought that I could just pop one of these off easily enough to show you how to do it and I tried and I couldn't get any of these key pearls on this Amazon saxophone to come off so that's actually a really good sign that they're actually using enough glue to hold these things in place but if that happens to you quick and easy fix nothing to worry about here's another quick fix you might need to do that you could easily do yourself at home it's a common issue on all saxophones but especially some of these lesser expensive imported instruments from China the key corks sometimes will fall off in the early days of playing it some of them are on there they're on there okay but the cut is not exactly you know there's little bits of cork hanging off the edge sometimes the cork is not perfectly centered on the key foot where it should be on professional instruments these things can come off as well so I'm going to show you how to fix them in a pinch it doesn't take very much all you're gonna need is a screwdriver that's going to allow you to get the key off that you're working with some keys are easier to get off than other today we're gonna do a common key that is easy to get off and back on we're gonna do our D palm key so I've got this this woodwind repair screwdriver I got this from music Medicom they sell these in all different sizes I'll put a link to this one this is great for saxophone hinge rods that's all and as you can see it swivels here I got this swivel hand that makes it very easy sometimes you might need some pliers to pull that out be careful that you don't lose your hinge rod while I'm here this is a little bit my spring so I'm just tightening that up a little bit be careful with these horns especially don't over tighten these screws because you don't want to snap the head off the screw with this out so I haven't had any corks come off since I've had it so I'm just gonna pull this one off you might want to use something to scrape the excess glue off I'm gonna do that here quickly with my little scraper tool there's a couple of different ways to go about this you can use contact cement takes a little bit longer or you can also use superglue which is really fast so you take a piece of cork first I'm gonna cut a piece that's a little bit bigger than what I need so that then afterwards I could trim around it so if I'm doing the superglue method I just take a dried piece of cork put a dot I superdude on there put one side flush with see that side is flush with the with the key and the other side has got the excess so I'm only gonna have to cut on one side of this court to trim it you know that's already on there and done and now I'm just going to trim with my exacto knife one just one cut there one cut there and you know really in a matter of seconds we've got a great fitting cork that's on there and it's not gonna come off for a long time when we put the key back on wipe off the the rod you can also clean out you know this is a brand new saxophone it's not really necessary at this point but you could take some pipe cleaners these are just some pipe cleaners and I got it at the tobacconist so we say tobacconist in America know wherever you get your smoking products you can get some pipe cleaners I'll put a link in the description below I'm sure they have these on Amazon well and these are great for cleaning out any excess oil or dirt that might be inside and then you can use key oil but for these things I like to use standard Yamaha slide grease take a tiny little bit I took away too much put it on there I put this in place slide that in tighten up the hinge rod wipe off the extra and now look at that I've got a beautiful cork that's not going anywhere for a long time makes a nice contact with the body when you play that note and open that key it feels really good all right that's it those are for quick repair jobs anybody can do at home for very little money you know when I originally unboxed this saxophone a lot of people in the comments were telling me oh you know those saxophones that are so they're so poorly made you can't repair them I got to say once again going through this saxophone can be fixed just like any other the build quality is not anywhere near that of a professional instrument but it certainly is adequate especially when you consider the price I put a link to this saxophone in the description below if you're on a limited budget and want to get yourself an alto saxophone you could do a lot worse than this laid alto saxophone I bought on Amazon for around two hundred and seventy dollars if you got some value out of this video please go ahead and click the thumbs up button if you're not already subscribed get yourself subscribe share this video with anyone else who may be interested thank you for watching and see you again very soon in another better sax video

Channel: Better Sax

Views: 106,682

Rating: 4.9293957 out of 5

Keywords: bettersax, better sax, saxophone lessons, saxophone repair, saxophone neck cork, saxophone key cork, saxophone neck tenon, how to fix a saxophone, alto sax, tenor sax, soprano sax, chinese sax, cheap sax, amazon sax, jay metcalf, lade saxophone, ammoon sax, slade sax, instrument repair, diy sax repair, easy sax repair, how to play saxophone, sax lessons

Id: 8CpMTDVZkjQ

Length: 16min 17sec (977 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2019