…and marching band, WGI, etc. Props for any sort of marching arts are only as good as the best “band dad” in your group. Some band dads are great engineers, but staying in budget is always the trick. Aside: that term was not (properly) defined in Urban Dictionary, so I added a definition ð
When it comes to props, the name of the game is cheap since they’re only used for a season. But they need to last a whole season, and work consistently. Sometimes you need to solve a problem which doesn’t have an off-the-shelf solution. When structural strength is not a concern, 3D printing can help.
Our trumpet soloist also has a 3D printer, so I dropped the spool off at his house and he was able to print all of them up. The cork was cut from a large sheet. It had sticky backing, but he made sure it would stay permanently with cyanoacrylate (CA) glue a.k.a. super glue.
At first I thought he paused the printer and switched from orange to white filaments to get the stripe look. Nope, it’s just white electrical tape – you’d never know from 10 yards away.
If you want to print straight mutes that are show themed, you can find the STL files here. I tried getting the cork from a local music shop without luck, so we bought some from Amazon.
Flag Clips
Another prop we had was a Route 66 street sign made from 1.5″ inside diameter (ID) PVC. The goal was to be able to clip a flag to the sign post so they can be moved around together without issue. Here’s the first version to give you an idea:
Version 1 barely survived one show, but that’s OK. The trial and error revealed where additional material need to be added for strength.
From feedback from the guard I learned the flag clip part could be a little bigger to accommodate the flag silk. Version 2 had a double-detent design to help prevent the flag from falling out on it’s own.
The clips slip over the PVC and it has enough room for pole tape (we used chrome Duck Tape). To hold them in place we just added a strip of duct tape on the opposite side of the clip. Here you can see the sign in the background. There are two small bulges on the bottom half of the post where the clips are fastened.
Both Shannon, our trumpet soloist, and myself have Creality Ender-based 3D printers. They’re not expensive, and you may already have someone in your group with access to one. They’re less than $500 and band nerds like to nerd out in other ways too. Ask around and use this new technology to your advantage, it wasn’t mainstream before but now it is. ð
If your Anki Cozmo battery if it no longer holds a charge, there’s a really good YouTube video on how to replace it.
That was the case with ours, so I watched it and want to add a couple extra pointers for those thinking of doing the same. The video has just about everything you need to do the replacement, including links to tools you may need to buy.
I went ahead and ordered the precision screwdriver kit linked from the video. In retrospect, I didn’t need it because I had all of the things I needed already: spudger, small phillips screwdriver, tweezers. But the prospect of being able to work on anything with a specialty screws was appealing.
Plus the case folds up neatly for storage.
Even with all the supplied bits, I still needed another small phillips screwdriver for one of the screws that is deeply recessed. It holds both of the main halves together. It’s the green one pictured below, along with all of Cozmo’s parts.
I put all the parts I took off in a row to make it easy to go in reverse order when putting him back together.
Soldering
This is the section that is sort of glossed over in the video. He shows you what needs to be de-soldered and soldered – the positive and negative battery leads shown in red and green (respectively) below.
I’m not going to go over all the things you need to know about soldering, but there are some important safety details we should cover before starting this replacement. The replacement battery will come with a connector on it, which needs to be removed.
So you don’t short the leads out, you need to clip the wires one-at-a-time. We’re not the FBI diffusing a bomb, but it could light on fire if you short both wires while clipping them at the same time. ðĨ
Remember to grab the rubber sticker off the original battery and add it to the new one.
Strip and pre-tin the ends of the wires before snaking the wires through the charging plate to the soldering points. That will keep the wires from fraying, and they’ll be ready to solder to the board.
In addition to having more capacity than the original battery, it is also physically larger. I had to massage the end of the cell (shown at the green arrow below), to get it past Cozmo’s edge detection sensor. Not great considering all of the lipo fires that start due to bad folds, etc.
Fingers crossed that it will be OK ðĪ After that I put everything back in reverse order. The whole thing took me around an hour from start to finish.
Cozmo works great and lasts even longer than he did brand new. A worthwhile replacement/upgrade if you know how to solder.
I recently took a trip to Scotland. I didn’t plan ahead to add international calling because I thought I could disconnect for a week. Sometimes the world has other plans.
After landing in Glasgow I turned on airplane mode and left wi-fi enabled. Not surprisingly, I received a couple iMessage texts from some of the Minnesota Brass staff.
What did surprise me is that I was able to send and receive regular text messages as well. I wondered if it was because I had enabled Wi-Fi calling. My suspicion was confirmed after I enabled it on my wife’s phone and text messages came pouring in ðĐ
It came in extremely handy when British Airways automatically canceled our flight home. An aside about British Airways:
BA is an excellent example of a company that has automated too many things. Our flight from Glasgow to London got moved by 20 minutes. We received an email stating that it had moved and if everything was OK, no action was required. Behind the scenes the automated systems at British Airways determined that the time to make the connecting flight was no longer sufficient and automatically canceled our return trip (without notification).
We tried to remedy this by walking over to talk to the BA baggage and ticketing agents directly at the Glasgow airport. But they’re just contracted workers that can check in luggage, they can’t do anything when it comes to reservations. The only option was to call.
We spent 4-hours on the phone calling and re-calling British Airways to remedy the situation. Calls of course were routed to their call center in India where it was extremely difficult to get through (usually a 20-30 minute hold time) and once we got through they were very eager to get us off the phone, stating that “the team is working on it.”
The fastest way I got through was to call American Airlines once they were open (who was the US partner for London -> Chicago). Then I gave them my ticket number and they transferred me to the BA support line, and somehow I was magically at the front of the BA support queue.
Ultimately half of our party got home on the original flight, and the other half had to stay an extra day.
Once it’s enabled you’ll see a “<Carrier> Wi-Fi” message at the top when you’ve got a good wifi connection.
You’ll need to verify your home address for emergency calls. Keep in mind that if you’re on wifi with the cellular network disabled, the address reported to emergency services will be the address you entered (likely your home address). So if I dialed 911 in Scotland they’d think I’m calling from Minnesota – be careful!
When making calls over wifi with your cellular service off, it will be like you’re dialing from home. No need to dial any extra country code stuff. Just mind the timezone differences ð
When the pandemic hit, I needed something to do. All my music stuff had been canceled. Unlike me, who works remotely, it was apparent that several businesses were going to be negatively impacted.
I contacted Best American Craftsman (aka BAC) in Overland Park, Kansas to see if they’d still be fixing instruments. They would be, but with some staff doing repairs at home, and a smaller staff in the shop at any given time. All good, I was in no hurry.
I sent in my Bach 42 trombone in specifically for their “Escape Velocity” slide service. Having sat in the case for at least a decade in the 2000s had not served it well ð Also, my F-attachment valve was slower than molasses in January, as they say.
Was it worth it to box up my case and ship it half-way across the country? Absolutely! It was like my slide and f-attachment trigger action were brand new – possibly even better than new ðŠ
Reconnecting with my people
I’ve had a ton of hobbies over the years – you can read about most of them on this blog. But recently I came to the conclusion that band people are my people. Of all the subcultures I’ve steeped myself in, they are the best. There’s something about band kids (we’re all band kids at heart) that binds us all together.
I’ve even found that some of my old high-school classmates are still active. An Irondale classmate invited me to a jazz camp in norther Wisconsin. Besides being all-around fun, I got to do group lessons with fantastic trombonist Andy Baker, and also actively work on improvisation – which I’ve never been good at. I’ll keep chopping that wood for next year’s camp ðŠĩðŠ
Slide oil, cream, or mix?
Working with River Valley Sound (the winter winds part of 728 Cadets) I met Chris. He’s a band director and trombone player. He was able to help me quickly hone in on what’s new.
Being a frequent pit-orchestra guy, Chris also gave me advice on a trombone stand. I initially went with the Hercules hand-slide stand. It is very solid and does avoid the stopper leaving a mark inside the bell. However, I quickly realized that I instinctively want to pick the horn up by the slide handle. And the slide handle is now in the stand ð So I switched to a standard style K & M stand. It’s more expensive because it’s made in Germany, but it’s solid and I just do what everyone else does – put a sock on the stopper so it doesn’t leave a mark in the bell ð
I was talking to a friend about my Chevy Bolt after I got it, and remarked how many features it has. Then I realized nothing on the list of features would impress him. He’s the type of guy that gets a new car every 2 years, so he’s seen the gradual stair-step addition of features across several models.
The “new” automatic windows that go all the way up/down with a single button press astound/annoy me. That’s how far behind I was.
I’d driven a 2002 Subaru WRX since 2005. It was a fantastic little car that was terrifically fast. At the time it didn’t have a lot of extra features – you could buy the base WRX for less than $25k in 2002. While the base MSRP for a 2021 Chevy Bolt is in the $30k range, tax and dealer incentives frequently brought it to the $25k price point.
Are there some things I miss from my WRX that the Bolt doesn’t offer? Of course. One of the things I’m completely willing to let go of is the additional .6 seconds of quarter-mile time. The Bolt does it in 14.9 to the WRX’s (stock) 14.3. The fastest I ever drove my WRX in the 1/4 mile was 14.001 – after several modifications. I’m OK with the Bolt being “stuck” where it’s at in terms of speed, because the motor/transmission/drivetrain is so dead simple that it may last forever.
The things the WRX had that I will actually miss:
Great seats (the Bolt’s are notoriously un-bolstered)
CD Player
All wheel drive
Turbocharger
Manual transmission
Occasionally that rumbly sound (but not on road trips)
Part of the reason I bought the Bolt without a test drive is because of this enormous gap in time. I knew that there would be a tremendous amount of “new stuff” that I wasn’t accustomed to. Would I have purchased a higher trim level like the Premier if I had test driven? Maybe, but only for the stereo upgrade ð
