Universal copper top and bottom valve caps

Gendreauj

Looking for a copper colored top and bottom valve caps.
Did not have any luck researching the ACB or Schiller websites.
Also do not want to buy from KGU. The price is above what I want to pay for the caps.
On ebay there are several affordable caps but not sure of fit or quality.
Any recommendations would be appreciated.

barliman2001

@Gendreauj
Three questions:

For which instrument(s) do you want these caps? Threads on these caps can be wildly different.
Do you want normal or heavy caps?
If it is just optics - why not just buy a normal spare set and have them galvanically coppered?

Gendreauj

Looking for copper, bronze or gold color caps for the silver color cornet.
Surprisely parts are interchangable between my PRC rebranded cornets.
The newest cornet I bought is a copper color. Tried the valves caps on the silver cornet, they fit and look good.
Yes it is mostly visual. Want lightweight caps for the cornet.
Definitely want the least expensive option.

Dr GO

I had Jason Harrelson send 4 valve caps just last week for my out of production flugelhorn that had no parts listed on an internet search. Contacted Jason and he had the parts he made personally. The question is how expensive is too expensive? Jason charged $137 for 4 silver valve caps. I know he makes copper tops as well. So if you strike out finding on line, send a message to Jason on the Harrelson web site.

Gendreauj

@Dr-GO
Thank you for the information. Have not decided yet what the budget we be for the caps

Dale Proctor

I’d just get an inexpensive set of caps that fit correctly and have them copper plated. As part of an overhaul years ago, I had an entire bell copper plated, and it wasn’t very expensive at the time.

Gendreauj

Thanks Dale for the information and photo of your cornet.
Waiting on email from Jim Laab music on valve caps options. The caps from the Schiller do fit on the ACB cornet.

stumac

Why not just swap the caps between the 2 instruments, the bottom caps do not matter but if the top caps are of a different thickness the valve alignment will be effected.
If you are adventuress there is a great number of DIY copper plating instructions on youtube,

Regards, Stuart.

Gendreauj

Great suggestion Stumac.
Did swap out the top and bottom valve caps of the cornets. Silver cornet now has copper colored top and bottom caps. Copper cornet has silver top and bottom caps. Both the cornets looking much better visually to me.
Now I looking for silver valve caps the same style of the copper cornet. My first priority is silver bottom caps.
Until proven otherwise I think Jim Laab music is my best source for caps.
One of my major goals is to spend the least amount of money on cornet parts. Trying to only spend money on valve oil, slide grease and the jazz/ blues instruction books.

Trumpetb

You need to beware of swapping parts such as valve top caps.

Older instruments were built by hand and each part of the structure of the valve was hand fitted to each other and were unique to the original valve they were fitted to.

Buttons, top caps, stems, valve guides, springs, and the valve body itself, could each vary in size and while they work flawlessly when in their original hand fitted position swapping for example the stem from valve one to valve two could result in one or both the valves binding with the cause not being apparent.

All parts might measure as being identical but these are often close tolerance parts and can easily bind with each other requiring the hand fitting of each part.

Swapping the top cap from valve one to valve two or valve three could also result in the valves binding.

Only the original position at manufacture of each part of each valve will be the correct position.

I have experienced this issue where an old instrument had binding valves there was no fix for this until I swapped valve stems and valve top caps around and found the original manufactured assembly positions.

We dont know if a player many years ago when cleaning the instrument, disassembled all the parts and did not pay attention to which part belonged to which valve.

Why would we believe this is important in a modern age where all small parts are made by machine to be identical and do not have to be hand fitted to each other for them to work correctly together.

Once I had found the correct original assembly positions of valve caps and valve stems on this problematic instrument the valves worked perfectly and flawlessly.

This is the major improvement that has been given to us by modern precision manufacturing techniques.

Any instrument older than 1970 or thereabouts might suffer this problem.

Any instrument earlier than 1950 almost certainly would have each individual part hand machined hand lapped and hand assembled.

Scavenging parts from other instruments probably will be fine but this cannot be guaranteed.

Gendreauj

Bought both of my doubler cornets from different companies. But both were made in China.
The design is the same and parts are interchangable.Which leads me to believe they were made at same factory.
The bottom bend in the Shepherds crook is the same as are all the tuning slides.
I like the looks and fit of the copper colored valves caps better than silver ones.