Michael Fahey


This blog is intended to document my time spent studying Band Instrument Repair at Minnesota State College in Red Wing, MN. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Saxophone Performance from Armstrong Atlantic State University, I decided to follow my passion, and focus on restoring antique and vintage musical instruments. As you can imagine there is no one school or program that can teach all of the different facets of such a discipline but the BIR Program is a great place to start. I intend to supplement this blog with more than just photographs of the instruments and look forward to sharing the research that I uncover along the way.

Project Trombone

For my project trombone I received an Olds Ambassador. The serial number on this horn dates it to the early part of 1978. This instrument has seen better days but I still think it can be a useful instrument for a beginning student.



The first four pictures show all of  the dent work that will be necessary for this trombone to play again. Everything is smashed up pretty bad and the main tuning slide is stuck. The inner slide tubes are missing plating and the bumper was also smashed at some point in time.


















One of the solder joints on the main tuning slide broke as I was trying to remove the slide. This is a quick fix,  but before I resoldered I took advantage of the added access to the bow in order to remove the dents that were present.



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