An Emergency Fix

This week in my lesson, I learned “a bit” about repair. 

Originally, my professor was supposed to help me perform a small repair on my oboe, but one repair turned into several others. Originally, we were going to place a small circle of cork under a key to even out the amount of lift on two keys, but upon taking apart and off some of the rods and keys to be able to perform this repair, we discovered how rusty and sludgy the reaction on a lot of these rods and keys were.  (This rust is all on the inside – just to clarify to those who are not musicians\oboists.)

This called for further maintenance. Normally, a key should rotate freely around the rod. On my oboe? The keys had to be given a bit more than a nudge to spin. To clean the keys, the screws and rods had to  be taken out and cleaned of the rust. To do this, friction is created between the rods\screws\keys to loosen the rust, and then a piece of paper towel is used to wipe the rust off. When all these bits and pieces are assembled back on the oboe, a bit of oil is usually applied to the screws.

This process was going well, but my keys were in fact so rusty that a spring snapped. My professor did not have a replacement spring at the time, so we had to resort to an emergency repair – the sort equivalent to a bucket under a leak in the roof. In the world of oboe, this means taking a rubber band and tying it around your oboe to hold a key up or down (depending on the key) so that it has the same tension of a spring, allowing the key to be lifted up or pushed down.

Luckily I got my spring fixed later that day. Not so fortunate was showing up to my ensemble rehearsal a bit late since the repair took so long. Even more unfortunate was discovering my professor had forgotten to attach my left F key to my oboe, but that was put back on later that day when I went to get the spring repaired.