Cutting a small tenor down to an alto

[Elow]

I’ve heard of people cutting king 606’s down to an alto side and i want to try it. I imagine the slide wouldn’t be too hard, but what about the bell? I would think that that’s the tricky part. Anyone done this and want to describe the process? I know i could just buy a jinbao and be done with it but this seems fun.

[DougHulme]

You might find this topic and another lead within it interesting... all the same problems/mechanics for this operation.

https://trombonechat.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=14477

[BurckhardtS]

You can do it, and some will say it's a bad idea, some will say it's good... If it works, it works. Charlie Vernon plays on a .547 alto.

[LeTromboniste]

I’ve heard of people cutting king 606’s down to an alto side and i want to try it. I imagine the slide wouldn’t be too hard, but what about the bell? I would think that that’s the tricky part. Anyone done this and want to describe the process? I know i could just buy a jinbao and be done with it but this seems fun.

Cutting down tenors to make altos has been done, in some cases quite successfully. But to do it well usually goes beyond merely cutting and putting back together, and involves actually modifying or making parts.

The first problem you'll run into is that you'll want to cut the bell stem to shorten the bell, which means the start of the bell will no longer match the tuning slide end diameter. Likewise with cutting the neckpipe, which depending on where you cut, will either end too small compared to the start of the tuning slide or start too big compared to the end of the slide section, in either case meaning a sudden increase of bore size. This can be remedied by making a new neckpipe and tuning slide, or sourcing them from a different donor horn (good luck with that), to have the bore sizes you actually need.

The second problem is you will have a hard time finding enough length to cut from the bell section to be able to keep the slide long enough to have 7 positions. The thing is you need to make most of the cutting in the bell section, but that's where cutting is the trickiest (for the reasons above).

For cutting the slide, the outer slide is straightfoward, you unsolder the bow, cut the tubes, reinstall the bow, but for the inner slide the stockings make it harder and mean you need to take it apart pretty much entirely, pull the leadpipe, and cut the tupes from the top.

[brassmedic]

You can do a search because this has been talked about a lot. But basically, if you can get ahold of an old Czech or French trombone (like the Sears Silvertone), they have a really narrow bell throat. If you used that bell and the rest of the parts from a normal .500 bore horn, you'd have a better chance of it not playing horribly out of tune.

[sterb225]

IMHO you'd get better milage out of buying the Jinbao, pulling it apart and re-assembling free of stress and with all the remnants of mass production sloppiness removed. You could even take the time to do a really nice brush finish with the bell completely off the horn.