An entirely new kind of challenge turned up on the pirate luthier ship last week. On Wednesday, a new bassoonist from overseas came to orchestra, but without a bassoon. The morning after, checking up on gumtree, I spotted a bassoon for sale for £100 - or 1 percent of what you would expect to pay for a new instrument. So I couldn't let that opportunity slip by. Reader, I bought the bassoon and since we have no woodwind repair person left in Oxford I'll have a go at making it playable myself, see how far I get.
The wing joint (or tenor joint, the first from right in the photo) is bent outwards a little bit. There's a bit of mold and some rust and corrosion in some places, and a lot of silver plating to be polished, but amazingly most of the pads look ok (I've played flutes with much worse for many years!) and most things move roughly like they should. The keys do make very satisfying plop sounds when I operate the mechanics. So I'm optimistic at this point, wish me luck.
The instrument comes as a jigsaw of five parts (plus a handrest and a reed, yet to be bought or carved) and looks like this (low light photo from the first evening after I arrived home with the instrument):
The keys / holes for the fingers are reasonably similar to the corresponding parts on flutes and saxophones. The thumb side is where bassoon design has gone absolutely bonkers. Which is why players need a handrest, to free the right thumb and enable it to operate four different keys - on the flute the right thumb only supports the instrument. The left thumb has up to nine keys (photo below) but the left hand finds support in the structure of the combined tubes.
Elsewhere, the keys are more spread out due to the sheer size of the instrument, so they can be dealt with individually without too much trouble (compared to the flute where the whole mechanics is a bit of a scary jumble, which is why I haven't taken a flute apart yet):
What was underneath the first key I took off:
As the handrest is missing, I have found a suitable piece of metal for that, just torn between using a wine cork or a cava cork for the bit that is normally plastic these days.
NB I've now moved the list of instruments that pass through my pirate luthier workshop to a permanent page which I will update whenever necessary, independent of the blog entries.
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