Replacing Saxophone Pads

today I'm going to show you how I replace some pads on a saxophone over time the saxophone pads will get dirty and they'll even get hard and brittle then they begin to leak there's a few tools you're going to need this is a pad pricking punch and pliers and this is a crochet hook that I used to hook up strings with put a little notch in the end of it right there and that's glue on it stick there's a razor blade and we've got to add leveling tools screwdrivers there's another kind of a leveling tool and you may need a rawhide mallet so I have some pads that have gone bad and they start to leak on this old saxophone and the one I'm going to change is in the upper stack and now it's pretty bad it's pretty brittle and leaking quite badly so this is a leak light the idea is you can put it down through the inside of the saxophone and the light comes out through the hole there and when you hold your your pad down you can see if it's if there's light showing like right there means you've got pretty bad leak so I go through and I check my pads that might be related to the problem here and you can see the light coming out of that bigger pad right there also right in that spot right there so there's a small leaf and all of these leaks add up to big problems when you go to play the saxophone so today we're going to take the keys off the saxophone and take those old pads out change them now the lower stack is in pretty good shape and the lower part of the saxophone so step one is take out this long screw that they've got that shows through all of the keys so you pull pull this long screw out and all of the keys will just fall right off I've gone ahead and and unhooked all my Springs you want to do that first before you pull that long screw out here we go kind of gently lightly get it all the way out there and all of these little log keys will come off I'm going to have to loosen up another rod in order to get the keys out of the upper stack so we'll take this little screw out sometimes there's a long long screw sometimes it's just a little short screw it holds things together so there we've got that little screw out now there's the pan that we're going to change so we begin to take off the keys to get at the ones you need to replace the pancetta and once you get the keys off you can inspect the pan you can see it's pretty dark and it's got a bunch of gunk on it there's a new pad right there you can see the difference so next we're going to start up our Bunsen burner here and we'll heat this key up and then pluck that pad out of there you put these pads in with a shellac which you heat up and so you have to heat up the key in order to get the old pad out so there we go we've got the old one out now we're going to heat that key up so that when I touch the shellacque to it it will melt onto that key so there we go I've got it hot enough and got some glue in there I'll use a little wooden peg here to press the pad down in so it's seated evenly on the key so now I've look things over and I've found a couple other pads that I might as well change while I've got the saxophone apart there's another one that's pretty bad so the same story we've got to be careful on this key there's a there's a pearl right there so you don't want to put the heat directly on that you'll melt the pearl so you've got a hold that thing so that you protect that pearl as you heat that key up just to the point where you can lift that ad out of there so the same story we just reheat the key and this time I'll hold it with a pair of pliers buy the pearl I kind of slant that up a little bit so that the heat is is directed away from that pearl and then we go we get the next pad seated down into that glue here's a third one this one's on a long rod so it's a little bit easier to hold on to as they heat it up but we still have to be careful of that pearl so we apply the heat and directed away from the pearl get it heated up enough and that pad will lift right up out of there so once again we heat it back up apply some of our shellac glue here and stick the new pad in so now it's time to reassemble the saxophone it's quite amazing the engineering that's gone into these saxophones and so all those parts will fit back in you just have to be patient and get everything lined up and this long rod you start right at the top and start feeding it down through each of the keys in that upper stack so that one rod holds all the keys on here we go we're just gently lining things up and shoving the rod down through I took a class at college for instrument repair and it was one of the the best classes I took to be prepared to teach instrumental music in public schools there's a lot of repairing that has to be done on this kids instruments and it's kind of nice if you know how to how to do some of these things so this is almost scatter rod completely through all the keys and once we get those get that rod down so we can screw it in the next step is to hook up all the springs so there we go then we can screw that rod in and you tighten it all the way down until it's tight and then back it off just a little bit I'm checking to make sure all the keys are moving freely and of course the springs aren't hooked up yet so they just just flop back and forth so right there you can see the spring it's a little needle spring this is where that crochet hook comes in I took a file and a little notch in the end of that crochet hook so I can push on the spring and hook it back up sit it on through and hook up all those Springs that operate all the keys of course with a girl shade hook you can you can either push with that with that crease that I filed in the end of the crochet hook or you can hook onto it with a hook and pull on the spring hook it up there you can see how the keys rebound yeah we're going to all look back up now the next step is to check with the leak light again and usually you're going to have to do some adjustments and these keys to get them so they work together and they don't leak and for some strange reason this time I put the pads in there and check with a leak light and everything seems real good there's several keys that work together you press one key down and it closes two keys so you have to make sure that that those keys are both seating both pads as you press it down I usually sit down here and all up stick that leak light down to the top and this way I can look at both sides of the pads and make sure there's no leaks as I go along so I'm checking that one side now we look around to the other side everything looks great so when the saxophone doesn't have any leaks it plays real smoothly and sounds great I've been playing the saxophone now for over 40 years and this is the only tenor saxophone that I've ever owned I bought this saxophone back in the early 70s and it's a beaut or wrister crack and through the years people have said what we like the sounds of that saxophone what kind is it when I tell them it's a student my lab you sure they can I really believe it a lot of people have said to me why don't you go out and buy a new professional model saxophone well the new saxophones just don't have the same sound as these old saxophones do it so I've stuck with this one all these years

Channel: TimTools99

Views: 138,554

Rating: 4.8639874 out of 5

Keywords: Saxophone, Saxophone Pads, Saxophone Pad Replacement, Saxophone Repair, How to fix a Saxophone

Id: 7pR9G3dNVWg

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2015