TromboneChat

How many of you use Great Slide, and does it make your slide faster, or just retard the time it takes for it to start slowing down?

I ask, because I don't ever seem to be able to "dial in" the amount of sealant very well, and thus it takes me a long time to get to the point where the dry slide is even clean enough to use after swabbing out the sealant many, many times, and simply using Wright's (or its successor) water-based brass polish seems to work fine: I might have to redo the brass polish once a month with a slide I play daily.

Anyone still using the Great Slide cleaner and sealant these days, and are you getting usable "bang for the buck" from doing so?

Slide Doc and Ray Splawn are great, but this looks like a LOT of work
https://slidedr.com/great-slide/

JTeagarden wrote: Wed Apr 01, 2026 6:48 am How many of you use Great Slide, and does it make your slide faster, or just retard the time it takes for it to start slowing down?

With regular, consistent and thorough post-playing slide hygiene (after starting with a properly maintained and set-up slide), and just a bit of lubricant (Yamaha or Rapid Comfort) and a distilled water spray before each use, I do not notice any perceptible "slowing down" of my slide action. Am I just lucky, or am I blessed with super slides?

Great slide is great. I'm pretty sure it's a kind of car polish that they've just moved into acrylic paint tubes and relabeled. They are pretty open about that, but probably won't tell you which polish it is

The most important part of the process, honestly, is the step *without* the Great Slide, where you remove all the tarnish and scaling from the outer tubes with brass polish.

The car polish stuff is good and makes the slide really smooth, but you gotta do a good job with step one first.

This is probably a silly question, but is the Cleaning Polish they sell along with the Sealant serve any different function than Hope's or similar?

Chazzer69 wrote: Wed Apr 01, 2026 2:58 pm This is probably a silly question, but is the Cleaning Polish they sell along with the Sealant serve any different function than Hope's or similar?

It removes corrosion and a tiny amount of the brass. It's a very fine abrasive. The cloth comes out black at first when you use it.

I’m going to give it another go, I am super bad at actually following directions, i was underlubing my slides forever until Boneartzt suggested I use a lot more, and immediately all my
slides worked much better, so maybe using as much of the sealant as Slide Doctor prescribes is the way to go..

Echoing Harrison, the step 1 using Wrights (I still have some) or whatever is critical. That should be doing a majority of the heavy lifting. Then it shouldn't take much of their cleaner nor the sealer. I bought a big length of cheesecloth and cut it into strips to use up and that helped the process finish within my patience for it. I think it helps keep the slide cleaner for longer and thus in better shape.

harrisonreed wrote: Wed Apr 01, 2026 8:39 pm It removes corrosion and a tiny amount of the brass. It's a very fine abrasive. The cloth comes out black at first when you use it.

Verrrry interesting ...

I don't use any abrasives on my bass slides (either the Getzen or the Shiller (!)). But I have used mild non-embedding abrasives on brass slides at times, and definitely on the outer slide of my old 1947 Olds Standard. I'm very careful about that sort of thing, and I do have a set of non-embedding industrial abrasives I picked up years ago at a tools/equipment auction for an old textile factory that was closing down around here. They are really great mild/fine abrasives in several different grades, and I've got one set for "hard" metals (iron, steel, etc.) and another for "soft" metals (copper, brass, aluminum, etc.).

But I've only seen the cloth coming out black in one case: Mothers Mag & Aluminum Polish, which is one of the favorites in the automotive market and an excellent mild abrasive. The instructions state that "If a black residue does not appear, STOP -- it is not a polishable metal."

Here is a quotation from a response by Mothers to a Chemist's query about the black residue:

The black residue is a minute amount of nickel being pulled from the metal..it is a good thing as it acts as a secondary polishing agent. The best polishing occurs in a very damp medium..that is, use sufficient product to create a significant amount of this black residue, then, remove while still wet...that’s how to achieve the best results...keep lots of dry towels handy and work in back and forth motions, not circles.

I don't think there is any nickel in my brass outer tubes. It's corrosion/oxidized brass that is being removed.

harrisonreed wrote: Thu Apr 02, 2026 4:40 pm I don't think there is any nickel in my brass outer tubes. It's corrosion/oxidized brass that is being removed.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about this, and I can't find anything really definitive. It's often said that the "black residue" from polishing is from oxidation (but oxidation of what?). And definitely common brass alloys don't list nickel as a component -- but mentions are also made of "small amounts" (e.g., 2%) of nickel in such alloys.

An oxide of copper (CuO) can be black. Maybe that's what's happening. But chemistry is among my weakest subjects. Oddly, I've never seen black residue except when using the Mothers polish.

I mean, I'd say it was from the coffee, but this happens *after* you swab it with brass polish. It could be residue leftover from that initial prices, as well.

The amount of brass it's removing from the outer slide tubes is almost nothing. Sort of like 5000 or 10000 grit Emory paper.

harrisonreed wrote: Thu Apr 02, 2026 6:33 pm I mean, I'd say it was from the coffee, but this happens *after* you swab it with brass polish.

Yeah, I've had the same experience with the Mothers stuff. I've used Brasso or J-B Cleaning Compound on a slide, thoroughly cleaned/swabbed the result (detergent and also 90% alcohol), then used Mothers on it, and it came out black. I'm inclined to buy into the oxidation account -- which would mean that if you keep it up "long enough", the black residue should start to taper off and eventually disappear. But that could be quite a long time and a lot of effort.

I did a "full monty" application of Great Slide on my Bach 50 slide yesterday, used water-soluble brass polish 5 or six times on the tubes, each time pulling out crazy amount of black residue, and cleaning and swabbing out the tubes twice before using the =Great Slide, polish, twice, then again carefully cleaning with hot water and dish soap and swabbing out the tubes again, then the Great Slide sealant, and swabbing the slides a couple times again after this.

Slode seemed clean, but when I lubed it up with Yamasnot and played the horn, there was black residue on the inner slide tubes when I wiped them down, and I could still pull out more black crud from the outers, but less and less.

The slide isn't any faster than when I only used brass polish a few times, but I hope it will stay faster longer.

JTeagarden wrote: Fri Apr 03, 2026 7:36 am .... but when I lubed it up with Yamasnot and played the horn, there was black residue on the inner slide tubes when I wiped them down, and I could still pull out more black crud from the outers, but less and less.

I don't know if it would make a difference in this case, but I always use 90% isopropyl alcohol for the final cleaning/wiping of my slides (and cleaning the insides of both the inners and outers as well). As a solvent, it works much better than water, and better than dry wiping. On occasion, when dealing with some odd patch of some kind of residue, I have used hydrogen peroxide (the normal strength) quite successfully when a range of other things just haven't seemed to work.

JTeagarden wrote: Fri Apr 03, 2026 7:36 am I did a "full monty" application of Great Slide on my Bach 50 slide yesterday, used water-soluble brass polish 5 or six times on the tubes, each time pulling out crazy amount of black residue, and cleaning and swabbing out the tubes twice before using the =Great Slide, polish, twice, then again carefully cleaning with hot water and dish soap and swabbing out the tubes again, then the Great Slide sealant, and swabbing the slides a couple times again after this.

Slode seemed clean, but when I lubed it up with Yamasnot and played the horn, there was black residue on the inner slide tubes when I wiped them down, and I could still pull out more black crud from the outers, but less and less.

The slide isn't any faster than when I only used brass polish a few times, but I hope it will stay faster longer.

You have to keep going until the cheesecloth comes out clean. And use clean cheesecloth when it gets black.

I've only used Great Slide once. My approach was the following:

-Vinegar soak for 20 minutes: stand the outer slide vertically and fill with food grade white vinegar
-Snake w/ Dawn dish soap
-Applied Great Slide treatment (vinegar took care of most of the tarnish)
-The followed Matthew Walker's approach with Trombotine (https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/684990 ... 7663872583)

Took a 7.5/10 slide and made it a 9.5/10. I actually ended up swabbing a lot of the trombotine off and not using the Yamaha lube. Then I used a mist water bottle. That in combo with the residue of trombotine on top of the great slide really made the magic happen.