Spring winding is quite easy, once you get the hang of it. By the time you've finished your first set, you'll probably be making them perfectly, and want to redo your first ones.
For French horn, I find .039" music wire by K-S engineering works as well as any. It's available in three foot lengths at most hobby shops and True Value stores for about fifty cents a piece. As a rule, I only work with straight, not coiled, wire. >From the same wire display, buy a piece of heavy wiry as large as will fit through the shaft hole. This will be used as an axle. I hold the axle wire in an old drill chuck, which I in turn mount in a very solid vise so the valve lever can be rotated 360 degrees. It might help if you get a wheel collar that the hobby shop sells to hold wheels on the size wire you're using for an axle. They're pretty cheap. Take an 18" piece of wire and thread it through the wire hole on the lever. If the spring isn't symmetrical, divide it proportionally to the number of coils on each side. Bend the wire double so it will naturally up and over toward the front of the lever. When bending the wire neatly, squeezing it square onto the soft brass lever will leave grooves. I protect the lever with a steel U-clip I made out of a small piece of thin, flat scrap, or use a couple of old razor blades. Mount the lever on the axle and secure it against the tip of the chuck using the wheel collar. Winding by hand requires a lot of tension on the wire, and once you start, you can't stop. To really securely grip the wire, I use a needle nose vise grip, and really lock it down. Make sure you're winding the right direction, then pull the wire tight enough that you can wind it on, a coil at a time, by carefully rotating the lever. If you rotate the vice grip very slightly as you wind, you can keep the coils in perfect contact with each other. Usually, part of the lever will prevent a full rotation. When you reach the obstruction, wind until you contact it, then bend the wire out and around while maintaining full tension. You'll be able to do this without distorting the coil. Keep winding under full tension until you have enough coils. If the key is captured on the axle tightly enough, you won't have a problem winding the end down onto the axle. Even so, don't wind too close to the end. Turn the key around on the axle and wind the other side the same way. Congratulations, you now have a spring that goes through the hole in the lever. The upside of the exercise is that with the long ends still on the springs, they can be hooked together over the top so they're not a pain when you mount the levers on the horn. Just unhook them when you're done, and trim the ends. When you do trim the ends, take a pair of needle nose pliers and bend a small hook at the ends of each spring wire. Next time you take the valves down you can tie the loops together over the lever to untension the springs, the only way to go. Before you take down the valves, put some weight on the levers to determine the pressure needed to push them. Something like a roll of coins works well. Use this to set the tension on the new springs. To decrease tension on a spring, wind the spring in the direction it is coiled. To increase tension, pull hard on the ends to wind the coil tighter. _______________________________________________ post: [EMAIL PROTECTED] set your options at http://music.memphis.edu/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
