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Desert Winds Music specializes in band and orchestra instrument sales, rentals and repairs.

Assembly/Disassembly of Instrument

Stuck barrels and sticky joints on clarinets, oboes and bassoons.

My experience with stuck clarinet barrels and sticky joints is that the tenon has warped to an oval shape. If one measures the outside diameter of the tenon with a micrometer or a caliper this is quickly evident. In fact I've seen many instruments come from the factory in this condition. This is not to say it left the factory this way. But wood does change and this is often what happens. In an effort to build an instrument that does not rock at the joints, the builder tries to establish some sort of compromise between the point that a joint would surely be too tight and give little tolerance for this change in shape and the point where if the joint shrinks some could make it wobble too much. Many times I am brought a new wood clarinet and I am asked to sand some cork off a tenon because it is too tight. Often it is not the cork that is too tight it is the wood on either side of the cork that is too tight. After all, the cork is simply a gasket that keeps the joint from leaking. It is the job of the bands of wood on either side of the cork to keep the joint from wobbling.

I have never seen a barrel I couldn't get off a joint. Although . . . last year someone here at ASU was trying out different barrels from different vintage Buffet clarinets and I thought I had one that was forever stuck. I thought this because the person admitted using more t little force to mount the barrel in the first place!

At this point, I usually take the trill keys off so I can get a good grip on the upper joint. The point is not to use force! I Try to rock the barrel side to side. Usually with a warped tenon you can find by feel a point where this rocking occurs. I just gently work it back and for until it comes off the joint. At this point if the tenon is greased and the barrel very carefully remounted, one can feel where the friction begins. Sometimes it is as the barrel is first mounted and sometimes not until it is almost fully mounted. Once I determine the approximate point of friction, I will put the joint in a lathe and take off a amount of wood in the area I felt the friction. In a warped joint, that wood will come off the "high" spot making the tenon somewhat round again. I say somewhat because one does not want to make the joint too loose. This task could be done freehand with a lathe using a little sandpaper but it would be difficult to only remove material from just the high spots and not the entire circumference thus causing excessive wood removal and premature rocking.

If the tenon is not brought into round and left oval (assuming lots of grease and care in assembling are used) the joint will eventually free up. This due to a combination of the wood again changing and the friction of mounting and un-mounting the barrel time and time again wearing down the high spots. Also when tenon corks are changed and sanded to shape some wood will be removed by the sandpaper in the shaping operation. More so if the instrument is sanded freehand as opposed to being spun in a lathe which allows much more control of the sandpaper. The key decision point here is how long will this process take and will the barrel sticking occur with regularity?

A special word of caution, if the instrument is assembled when the socket rings are loose and the joint is very tight, the risk of cracking through the socket becomes very high. In addition, if a joint cracks through the socket of the lower joint the risk is very high that the crack will extend into the top tone hole of the lower joint. Since the wood is too thin at the socket to pin, this becomes a very costly repair involving replacement (grafting) of a new socket and greatly devalues the instrument.