Western Europe Group

Wow, what a tough decision you have to make.

I had the choice between getting stuck in snow or chilling on a beach in Mexico. As you can imagine, I agonized over that decision for months.

Just got a call from a choir conductor... he needs me as second trumpet in Mozart's Piccolomini Mass on Christmas Day...
modern, well-heated church, playing in the organ loft (civvies permitted)... so all the plans of spending Christmas Day with my mother-in-law went overboard - no turkey for me!

@Kehaulani-0 "It's not Unusual..."

I know exactly who Alison Balsom is... but the lady in question was in her fifties when she bought the cornet off me (around 1993), and dark and short-haired... if she is still alive, she must be in her late seventies or eighties by now. And the Munich brass band Alison Balsom played in was a very different entity from the band I joined on flugelhorn in 1992... in my time, it was more or less a scratch band put together from odds and ends of failed oompah bands, with an averge age of between 60 and 90, and fell apart around the 2000 mark more or less from old age of many players... the current Munich Brass Band is an excellent band mostly made up of younger, aspiring players with an entirely new organisational corset and the like.

Many, many years ago (must have been around 1995), the late Hermann Ganter of Munich made me a cornet and gve it to me, suitably engraved, as a birthday present.
Some years later, I was in financial straits and sold that cornet on to a fellow cornet player, an English (?) lady called Alison Something then playing in the Munich brass band.
Shortly afterwards, I had to relocate and lost all contact to the band, the lady and the cornet.
Now, I would dearly love to get that cornet back somehow, but the band disbanded and reformed and there are no records of contact details of the players...
Yellow brass lacquered shepherd's crook cornet, engraved with HERMANN GANTER and a German language birthday message mentioning my name. No serial number.
If you know anything about the whereabouts of that cornet, please contact me!

Which reminds me....Maynard had some kind of frankenhorn with both a slide and valves. Anybody remember what this thing was called?

Time for a soprano trombone?

I can confirm that that iceberg is huge, and in pristine condition. Steve Smith has been hoarding treasures for years... now it is for you all to say "Open Sesame" and get at the treasure...

@Anthony-Lenzo I want to be very clear that I am not assuming that your technician made a mistake or was not good! Sometimes there is dirt and damage that the technician can only compensate for. I make a huge difference between repair or restore. Restoration is usually far more costly in terms of time and effort.

Generally, only really serious dents (tube almost mashed together) will affect the intonation.
That being said, a technician that knows enough to tell you if removing the dent can cause a tear or hole, should be able to judge if it is intonation critical. If after a repair, a patch was applied, this will also not have any serious effect on intonation - especially if we are not talking about a professional player and her/his favorite horn!

One recommendation that I would offer to Anthony: please post pictures when you ask questions like this. Maybe we could offer advice BEFORE you make an uninformed decision. Some of us have been doing this for a VERY LONG TIME!

I have never had a dent tear because my tech annealed the dents before doing anything. Annealing is a process to soften the grain structure of metal to reduce stress. It is used when originally forming the tuning slide and slide bows as well as when hammering the bell.