How to free stuck slides.



Well, there are lots of ways to do it (and a lot of ways to damage them further). But my recommendation - as the most aggressive way of doing it, as opposed to letting a repair technician do the work - is to:



Spray them with penetrating oil (such as PB Blaster or WD40), and let that soak in.



Get a thin belt or a rope of 1/2 or better thickness (or something that will fit on slides where the clearance between the tubes is narrow). Put it around the stuck slide, and around something solid, like a pole.



Hold the sides of the stuck slide - no other parts of the horn and give it repeated jolts by pulling the rope/belt taut. Many small jolts is the trick, not hard ones.



The danger here is pulling the horn out of shape or pulling it apart. So, if this doesn't work, it is probably better to let a service technician dissemble the slide and get it released and then put it back together. That is a lot less work than getting a horn that has been twisted back to normal.



Also, depending on which slide is stuck and the type of horn...if you can find some type of tube or rod that fits snugly inside of the outer tube (the one the slide fits into) and insert it into the opposite end of the outer tube, you can often tap the slide out.

While you are pulling on the slide with the belt technique, you might have a second person lightly heat and lightly tap on the slide/outer slide tube. The heat shouldn't be too hot to touch and naturally the tapping should be light enough to not cause dents... This helps to loosen up any "gunk" and allow the penetrating oil further into the tube.



I would recommend letting the penetrating oil sit overnight and give it a chance to work before trying the riskier belt/vice method.

The more aggressive way to free slides is to pop off the curved portion of the crook, insert a tight tolerance mandrel into the stuck inner tubing and turning it carefully by gripping the end of the tube and the mandrel with a set of ground pliers. The tubes ease out nicely. Then it's a simple matter to clean up the pieces and solder them back together again.



It's interesting as well to work on an instrument that is made entirely of sheet brass. Every piece of this instrument is made by hand. If you split one of these seams open as I find very easy to do while working with the inner tubing, you just must solder them back together and clean the piece up again. It's a lot of work. It probably should be done with a hard solder and then it would be even more difficult to finish. If the joint is going to be held at all, it must be clean with good fresh metal showing. The edges can be scrapped with a fine blade.