Valve Trombone Cleaning

[Geordie]

For health reasons I clean my slide trombones weekly with 70% rubbing alcohol and a brass saver brush. Based on advice from this forum, and my doctor. Works great.
This weekend I did an Ellington show that called for valve trombone, which I used.
The brass saver cannot get past the valves. My plan is to pour some rubbing alcohol down the mouth piece opening and move the instrument around through various angles/dimensions in the hope that the liquid will contact the interior surfaces, then drain it out again.
What do you think? Anyone else had a similar situation?

[Chronos91]

Are you comfortable removing the valve for this? I think that might help prevent the oil from getting pulled out or winding up with alcohol mixed in it. You'll also definitely need to remove all grease beforehand and re-grease the tuning slides after.

If you aren't comfortable removing the valve, maybe you could blow air through to make sure all the alcohol dries before lubricating everything again. I think the slide is going to be much more important to clean than the bell section (I personally just clean my slides), so just having the liquid and not brushing the bell section might be all you need.

Edit: Is it a piston valve trombone? I may not have been reading this right. If it is, removing the valves is way easier, but I'd think that the valve slides would be straight and accessible if that was the case.

[dwcarder]

I am also guessing piston valves? You might want to consider a microfiber swab that has a length of cord with a weight on the end. With that you should be able to snake through all of the removed valve slides and so on. You can trim the length of cloth to suit as well.

one example: https://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical ... index.html

[Geordie]

Piston valves. Helpful comments. Thank you.

[atopper333]

Hello,

I don’t have any experience with valve trombones, but this is what I do on my euph. I remove the valves and tuning slides. I then wipe everything down that I can reach with a cloth to get as much moisture out as I can. After this I use a leadpipe pull through style swab like this one:

https://www.musicarts.com/yamaha-microf ... N4QAvD_BwE

I like the Yamaha one as the weight is coated with heavy rubber. I pull it through all tubing, then relube. Some areas like the 2nd valve tuning slide are tight so I just wipe that one out, it would be easy enough to put alcohol in it if it is as small as all the others I’ve encountered.

Depending on the bore size of the tubing, a trumpet style pull through might be better as there is less cloth with will allow you to get it through without having too much material that may get stuck. You would just have to make sure the cord length is long enough…