Let's assume, for a moment, that you're sitting down of an evening - perhaps with a cool beer in hand, or a jar of cockles - ready for a spot of entertainment via the medium of your telly. This telly, however, has only two channels; on channel one there's a display of gymnastics, given by a fleet of finely honed athletes, which promises to be a veritable feast of men jumping, successfully, over various items - such as sticks and sand; on channel two though is a programme about woefully unfit, and possibly drunk, middle-aged men attempting to do pretty much the same thing around the house - with predictable results.
What's it gonna be?
Well, it's a fair bet that the vast majority of you will opt for the spectacle of people falling over and otherwise damaging themselves and anything else within range. This is because we all enjoy a laugh at other people's expense, and few things are more entertaining than watching someone make a pig's ear of things.
The Germans have a wonderful word for this, the tongue-wrappingly rich "Schadenfreude".

Similarly, if you take your kids for a walk around a local museum it's a fair bet that the bit that will most appeal to them is the section that houses the 'nasties' - grizzly jars containing pickled pigs with three heads; photographs of apparently self-combusted human remains; the actual mincing machine used by the Pie-Making Whippet-Snatcher of Pudsey...and perhaps a display dedicated to fashion in the 1980's.

Every museum worth its entrance fee has one of these - known, in popular parlance, as a 'Black Museum'.
I'd like to have one too, but unfortunately my job is more about fixing things rather than preserving their state of hideous disrepair...but that doesn't stop me taking a few photographs and sharing some of the more horrifying examples that find their way into my workshop prior to my fixing them up.
So, pour that beer, dip into those cockles, and prepare to be shocked, awed and truly queasificated ( OK, I just made that word up...but you heard it here first, right? ) by some of the horrors that have crawled onto my workbench.

First up is a tenor sax crook socket.
To the untrained eye it looks quite normal - harmless even.
It's only when you understand how it's supposed to work that the true horror becomes clear.
You'll notice a small slit in the bore. That's there because this joint is effectively a clamp. The crook tube slides into this socket, and by applying force to close the gap that the slit provides, the crook is held firmly in place.
It follows, then, that some means of closing that gap is in order - to whit, a clamp.
And so we have a clamp, on the outside - complete with a neat screw and a corresponding slit.
I suspect that you're now beginning to see the problem - the slit in the socket doesn't line up with the slit in the clamp.
Aha, you say, surely the clamp can still apply pressure to the joint.
Well, it could if the clamp was free to move on the joint tube - but it isn't...it's soldered in place - so you could do the screw up as tight as you like and it would never make any difference to the tightness of the crook fitting. The best it can do is bend the clamp screw sockets, or break the screw itself.
The thing that's particularly devilish about this example is that the clamp is in the right place - it's the socket tube that's not. It's been removed ( or fallen off ) and refitted out of line. The clamp has been removed too, and refitted - but can only fit in one position due to the necessity to line up that pillar with the rest of the octave key mechanism.

Moving on to the next example we see an octave key mechanism on a Selmer.
Again, a casual observer might not notice anything terribly untoward - but look carefully at the area around the right hand pillar.
Notice the gap where the key ends and the pillar begins?
Look too at the how the rocker bar sticks out of the key at its left end - and note how far away the thumb key touchpiece is from the thumbrest.
This is a Frankensteinian octave key mech - made up from parts of no less than three models of Selmer saxes.
The bulk of the mechanism is the original Mark VI keywork; the bit at the end ( where the gap is ) is from a Reference series, and the thumb key is from an SA80 series.
What you can't see on the photo is that the thumb key arm ( that connects it to the mech itself ) has a slot in it that's completely incompatible with the part of the octave key it's supposed to connect to. Needless to say, it didn't work at all.

Next up is a truly gruesome exhibit.
Again, the ghastliness of this one isn't immediately evident.
I'm sure you can all see the difference in the two bell keys shown. The B key ( the lower one ) looks fine...the cup appears to be sitting nicely above its corresponding tonehole - but the Bb key seems to be somewhat out of line, showing a sizeable gap at the rear and being rather too far forward.
I would not blame you at all for supposing that this is nothing more than a bent key. Some of the more knowledgeable among you might even suggest that the pillar ( just visible at the bottom of the photo ) has been knocked out of line.
Not so, I'm afraid.
This, my friends, is another freakish transplant operation.
There is nothing wrong with the position of the pillar; there is nothing wrong with the angle of the bell; there is even nothing wrong with the Bb key...other than it's from a different instrument.

The full nastiness is revealed when you look at the other end of the key.
The touchpiece for the Bb key sits on the left of the photo.
Note how very far away it is from the other two touchpieces.
Granted, the key is of similar design to the one that should be there but it's from a different, later model - and not only has the bell angle changed on the later model, but also the position and alignment of the bell key touchpieces, or 'spatulas'.

I feel you're now ready to withstand the real horror behind these exhibits - they all feature on the same instrument.
Oh, there's more too - but I wouldn't want to be accused of giving anyone nightmares.
Suffice to say, what we have here is a late vintage Selmer MKVI tenor that has evidently lost a number of keys.
Whoever has attempted to fix it ( and I know who ) has worked on the principle that, say, a Bb key is a Bb key is a Bb key...and that whilst it would perhaps be foolish to replace a missing key from a Selmer with one from, say, a Yamaha, it should be perfectly acceptable to replace it with one from another Selmer...albeit a different model.
So - rather like the popular country and western song that celebrates a Cadillac built from parts that span a number of years, this Selmer is a MKVI/VII/SA80/Ref 54.
It was purchased on Ebay, and the seller commented that it 'needed a few repairs, none of which are beyond the scope of a competent repairer'. He was right - he just failed to mention that those repairs would almost certainly get very close to the four-figure mark.

My next exhibit is perhaps rather less gruesome, but is still guaranteed to make you wonder what on earth was going through the troubled mind of the person responsible for it.
The horn in question is the much vaunted King Super 20 'Silversonic' tenor. A late model, but nonetheless still a highly desirable piece of kit - even more so considering the fact that is has just been fully overhauled and sports a particularly fine set of black pads, complete with Noyek reflectors ( or resonators ).
Now, the term 'overhaul' implies that any problems that might affect the proper operation of the instrument have been corrected - such as wear in the keys, broken springs, missing corks and worn out pads etc. It also implies that any bodywork problems have been sorted out, such as significant dents, bends, loose fittings etc.
From experience I have to say that, unfortunately, this isn't always the case - and many an apparently overhauled horn requires extra work to bring it up to standard. More often than not this relates to worn action or badly seated pads - but this horn really takes the biscuit.
The overriding principle of replacing a pad on an instrument is that both the key cup and the tonehole must be level. If there's any discrepancy at all the pad will fail to seat properly - or if it does seat, it's likely to be unreliable once the pad settles down or ages.
I often spot wobbly toneholes/key cups on overhauled horns, but for the most part the discrepancies are slight - and I put it down to the repairer's lack of experience or laziness.
What you see here though is quite the most spectacularly warped tonehole I've seen in quite a while. Indeed, the photo doesn't quite do it justice - you need to see it from at least two angles to fully appreciate how bad it is.
How did it get that bad, and could it have happened subsequent to the overhaul?

Well, there are no dents visible in the body adjacent to the dips on either side of the tonehole - so that rules out the horn having copped a whack after the work was done. However, there's evidence of dent removal adjacent to the peaks ( front and rear ) - which means that the dips are in fact at the right height...and the peaks have been pushed up by dent removal. You can't push a dent up by dropping the horn, it takes a very deliberate act on the part of a repairer to do so.
Furthermore, look along the bottom edge of the key cup - it's clearly warped too.
It got like that because whoever fitted the pad ( and once again, I know who ) did so in full knowledge that the tonehole was out of level...and took a mallet to the key cup in a fiendish effort to bash it so that the pad followed the warp in the tonehole.
If you think that's bad - this is but one example of many on the same horn.
Were it just the one tonehole I might have given it the benefit of the doubt and assumed that something strange and horrible had happened subsequent to the horn having an overhaul...but the presence of many similarly warped toneholes and correspondingly bent key cups undoubtedly points to a 'mallet-set' pad job.

Continuing on the theme of being heavy-handed with a hammer, this next exhibit is a perfect example of what's known in the trade as the old 'double bounce dent'.
There are many techniques for removing dents from saxes, and the most common is that involving the dent ball. This is nothing more than a smooth, rounded ball fitted to a steel bar. The principle is simple enough; a suitable ball is chosen and fitted to a bar that's firmly clamped in a vice, the bar is inserted into the bore of the horn until the ball sits under and makes contact with the dent, and then the bar is struck with a hammer. The shock travels down the bar, through the ball and out into the dent. In effect it's like being able to climb into the bore and hit the dent with a hammer.
It's an effective means of removing dents, though a very great deal can go wrong if you don't have quite the right touch.
By far and away the most common problem comes from choosing the wrong size and shape of dent ball.
When you whack that bar it vibrates - and the important point here is that it vibrates in two directions...into the dent and away from it. Once the ball is much larger than about 50% of the bore diameter there's a very real risk that a suitably heavy whack to the bar will allow the dent ball to smash into the opposite bore wall - and so the skilled repairer will be careful to gauge both the right sized ball for the job and the right weight of the blow to the bar.

This is what happens when it all goes wrong.
The horn in question is a Selmer Reference 54 alto - a very expensive bit of kit indeed.
There are two features to note here; the three ripples on the body and the slight bulge just above the top F tone hole.
The horn had originally sustained damage to the opposite side - a fall had resulted in a dent around the octave key pip where the top F# key pillar had been driven into the body.
This is a particularly tricky job as this pillar sits on a strap that runs the entire length of the left hand key stack. It's clearly not practical to remove this strap...though it is possible to unsolder and lift just the end, which makes for an easier job when it comes to removing the dent.
If you don't lift this strap off you're effectively trying to remove a dent from both the bore wall and the strap..and that's a LOT of metal.

Naturally there's another method, and that's to shove a dent ball up the horn and give the bar the mother of all whacks - and that's precisely what's been done here.
If you look closely at the photo you can make out three distinct ripples...which means that the repairer hit the dent bar at least three times, and presumably never noticed the damage being inflicted on the opposite wall...or perhaps didn't care!
If you think this is bad, it gets worse.
When a horn gets dropped with enough force to bash a dent under a strap it usually means the body bends - and indeed it did. Thing is though, this bend was left in.
When a body bends it increases the distance between the pillars - and this had been resolved by a combination of knocking pillars over at an angle to take up the gaps, and, where that had been insufficient, the fitment of a brass washer between the end of a key barrel and the pillar.

This next exhibit is breathtaking in its deviousness insomuch as real money, and lots of it, was paid out for the privilege of having the 'work' done.
It's a truly awesome example of a cack-handed job, otherwise known as a 'right royal cock-up. What makes it particularly horrifying is that the job was done by someone who's a member of a repairer's trade association, NAMIR, which led to the unsuspecting victim thinking that the quality of workmanship would be at least of a certain standard ( the poor fool! ).

Cast your eyes over this right hand stack setup.
The keys are being held down with more than enough pressure to ensure a decent seat on any sax that's halfway reasonably set up - and yet there are gaps clearly visible above each of the toneholes. My standard test for a well set pad is to trap a cigarette paper between the tonehole rim and the pad - when it's pulled out I'd feel a steady grip if the pad is seating. On each of these pads I reckon I could get a couple of client's Christmas cards between the tonehole rim and the pad...and still have room for a fag paper.
A leak of this magnitude can never go unnoticed - even by a non-player.

Things weren't much better up the top end either. Here's a shot of the left hand key stack, with a positively cavernous gap between the B key cup and its tonehole.
If you could see to the right you'd see a gap below the auxiliary pad too. With such leaks at the top end of the horn it was little wonder that the lower leaks weren't noticeable, the poor player could never get below G - even with a grip on the keys that would have made the Incredible Hulk sweat.
You could suggest that it wasn't so much that the pads weren't seating, rather the problems were down to bad regulation - but if you corrected the regulation ( which I tried ) the pads still didn't seat properly.

You can but imagine the anguish - but it doesn't stop there...

Here's a small collection of key cups taken from the unfortunate instrument.
The starting principle of repadding a saxophone is astonishingly simple - remove the old pads and replace them with new ones that fit the cups. In this instance the word 'fit' has been used in its most liberal sense...sure, the pads do actually go into the cups - but only in the same way that a man with a size 36 chest will fit into a size 42 jacket.
The big problem here is that pads aren't exactly flat - they tend to roll down at the edge - so it's very important to ensure that you maximise the flat area by fitting pads that completely fill the cups. If you don't you run the risk of the tonehole trying to make a seal on the roll-off of the pad, and this is never satisfactory.
The largest cup shown is that of the low Bb key - and you can just see that the tonehole impression practically falls off the side of the pad. It wouldn't have mattered though, as it was completely impossible to get a note anywhere near the low Bb...and if it were possible the Bb pad was leaking anyway.

On its own this job is one of the most unedifying exhibits I've ever had the misfortune to display, and even now I can feel the cold chill of revulsion that creeps up your spine....but wait, the worst is yet to come!
How much d'you think changed hands in remuneration for this grisly operation? £50? £150? £250??
Alas no - a truly knee-wobbling, gut-wibbling, head-borking £500 was handed over in exchange for the foul deeds you see laid bare before you today. O Tempora! O Mores! O Bugger!

This next addition to the collection is perhaps a little less daunting than the previous exhibits, but it will still tug at that part of the human psyche that can't resist slowing down to peek at traffic accidents on the other side of the road.
What's particularly notable about this exhibit is that it doesn't involve the actions of a third party - rather it's an example of a horror spawned during manufacture.
The unfortunate beast in question is an unusual tenor sax branded 'Galasso', a Brazilian manufacturer.
The horn itself is nothing to write home about, just a basic student horn by the looks of it - and to the casual observer it just appears to be 'A.N.Other' old horn. But look a little closer and the awful truth is revealed...

What you see here is a standard drawn and rolled tonehole - but what's that brassy patch at the rear?
It's exactly that - a patch.
No big deal on its own, the tonehole might have suffered some kind of trauma at some point which required the fitting of a patch - but look at the other tonehole and you can see evidence of yet more remedial work at the rear.
It's the same for practically each and every tonehole on this unfortunate instrument - almost all of them have been patched or filled, some in more than one place.
What's happened here is a problem in the manufacturing process. As the toneholes have been drawn out of the body they've fractured, perhaps due to the poor quality of the brass or some fault in the drawing process itself. There are plenty of scratch marks in the toneholes which might indicate the drawing tool was rather rough and ready - so these toneholes weren't so much carefully drawn as violently ripped out of the body. There's some evidence to suggest some of the repairs were made before the horn was finished in nickel plate - which certainly points the finger at the manufacturer.
In spite of all that, it actually blows quite nicely ( in places ).

And now, good people, prepare yourself for the foul horror that is....

What you see here is a vintage Selmer MkVI baritone sax - a very early example, with a low A - with a hole drilled through its body and a guard stay fitted with the aid of a nut and bolt. At first sight it appears to be nothing less than vandalism, but if you look a little closer it takes on a more interesting perspective.
What you have to bear in mind is that Selmer once thought it a good idea to use two-point mounted guards on some of their saxophones ( as opposed to the standard three-point mounts just about everyone else uses ). There's no structural advantage to a two-point mount, so it would have been one of those 'natty ideas' that someone in the company felt would add to the aesthetic appearance of the instrument. However, there are significant drawbacks to the design - not the least of which is that there is less load-spreading in the event of a knock to the guard, and without the third foot the slightest knock could tip the guard forwards or backwards.

The end result was that many players got so fed up with the guards moving about that they had their repairer pop a drop of soft solder over the securing screws to help keep the guards in position. It was the only effective means of dealing with the design flaw.
It brings to mind a 'discussion' I had on one of the saxophone forums regarding the design of saxophone bell braces, in which I made the point that truly effective bell braces didn't appear until around the 1970s, when Yamaha came up with a design that looked like someone had given more than a passing thought as to how damage to the saxophone's body could be minimised in the event of an impact to the bell by fitting a bell brace that was designed to absorb and deflect the energy. I was assured most pointedly that the boffins at Selmer knew what they were doing and that their original ring design would have been a highly developed and tested piece of engineering ( instead of, as I maintained, just a pretty way of securing the bell to the body ).
If the boffins really were thinking about design, how on earth did the two-point guard make it past the drawing board - and what possessed someone to fit it to a low Eb key ( a key that takes an awful lot of knocks, inside and out of the instrument's case )...and on a hulking great baritone saxophone?

Anyway, as the instrument was owned and played by a rather distinguished professional, he had little choice but to address the problem of the poor design and had someone attach a third foot to the guard.
The manner in which the foot is fitted to the guard is actually quite neat, with a carefully shaped flare and a countersunk bolt to secure it in place - but it all goes a bit wrong when it comes to fitting the foot to the body. In all fairness I suspect that the intention was to do the job without damaging the lacquer - which meant no soldering...hence the use of a bolt to fit the foot to the guard and another to fit it to the body.
It was decided to tidy the job up and make it more permanent, which would also deal with the inevitable leak that comes from having a bolt fitted though the body - but how to do the job with the least amount of damage to the remaining lacquer?
Ideally I would have liked to have made up a small plug for the bolt hole and silver-soldered it in place, but that would mean bringing the area up to red heat...and that would have burned off a great deal of lacquer. So, I went with the plug idea but silver-soldered it instead to the guard foot so that it would locate in the bolt hole. It had to be carefully made to ensure a snug fit in the hole and to lie flush with the bore. The whole affair was then soft soldered to the body, just like a standard guard foot mount - and the bolt on the upper end of the foot would allow for removal of the guard for access to the Eb key cup.

A little reprise now, in the shape of a 'spot the deliberate mistake' exhibit.
As many regular visitors to my site will know, I've been very interested in instruments coming out of China - and it's been fascinating to watch the rise in quality and development in the last few years. However, there still remains something of a barrier when it comes to a common language. It's quite clear to me that there are some highly skilled craftsmen and women involved with woodwind instrument manufacture in China, but there are times when confusion arises over what the buyer wants and what the manufacturer thinks they want.
What you see here is an alto saxophone crook. It's no ordinary crook - the tube is hand formed out of solid silver. It's nicely made too, not quite up to the standard of, say, a Gloger crook, but then it comes in at less than the price of replacement standard brass crook as churned out by one of the big manufacturers.
That's an astonishing prospect - being able to by a handmade solid silver replacement crook for less money than the one that originally came with your horn.
The trouble is, something got lost in the translation, and the result can be seen here.

Have you worked it out yet?
If not I can put you out of your misery.

Take a look at the tenon sleeve. Although the crook itself is meant for an alto, the sleeve is for a tenor!
It's not that easy to spot at first - or rather it is, it's just that most people can't imagine such a thing happening and so completely ignore it. It becomes quite apparent when you hand the crook to someone and ask them to fit it to their alto.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this crook is the sleeve ring ( that sits atop the tenon sleeve ). At some point during manufacture someone will have needed to fit the sleeve to the crook tube. They couldn't have used a sleeve ring off a tenor crook as it would have been too large a fit over the crook tube, and one off an alto wouldn't have accommodated the sleeve tube - so they would have had to make one up especially for this crook. I would like to think that at some point the maker thought "What the ****?", but then he or she probably had a ticket on the bench that stated the buyer wanted the crook built exactly to that design - and that's exactly what the buyer got.

It's a well-known fact that it costs money to maintain a collection of any kind. Museums often spend many hundreds of thousands of pounds to secure important exhibits on behalf of the public at large, and the shwoodwind black museum is no different.
I found this next item in a 'storage repository' and immediately entered into difficult and drawn-out negotiations to secure the item at a reasonable price, in order to display it for posterity in this humble collection. Or, to put it another way - I spotted it at the local tip and offered the guv'nor a fiver, on the basis that it was so utterly appalling that I simply had to have it.
And so, showing once again that the black museum trawls the very face of the planet to bring you the very best exhibits - I present 'The Indian Saxophone'.

At first glance this instrument looks very much like an original Adolphe Sax saxophone. The small bell (to low B) is very indicative of a sax from that era, as is the double octave key and the basic keywork.
A closer inspection reveals that this is, in fact, a copy. A very poor copy. A very poor, modern, copy.

The story behind these instruments is that they are knocked up in small sheds out in rural India. Whether that's entirely true or not I have yet to confirm, but it seems a highly likely state of affairs.
The true horror of an instrument like this is that they're sometimes seen for sale on places like ebay. I suspect that there are few visitors to this collection who would be foolish enough to buy one of these - but there are still plenty of people out there who have never really seen a saxophone 'up close', and are likely to be tempted to buy one of these simply because of the cheap price (much cheaper even than a basic Chinese saxophone). I suspect too that the tourist trade accounts for a large number of purchases.

What's quite interesting about this saxophone is that the body is surprisingly well-made. Although Adolphe Sax is rightly revered as the inventor of the saxophone, his own examples weren't as well-made as you might have imagined - and the body of this sax is nearly as good as any I've seen on an original Adolphe sax.
But that's as far as it goes, because everything else is completely and utterly dreadful.

On the left you can see a close-up of the top stack. It's quite plain to see just how badly made the keys are. They appear to be a combination of pressed (keycups), turned (pearl holders) and cast parts - none of which really fit together with any kind of accuracy. Where there are gaps (and there are gaps, some of them quite large) there are generous blobs of soft solder.

Keys that don't quite fit have been hammered and roughly filed into shape, and when even this hasn't worked they've been fitted anyway. The rod screws, which on any half decent sax serve as pivots for the action, merely hold the keys between the pillars. If they move up and down it's a bonus, and if they're at all stiff then this is overcome by the use of fiercely powerful springs.
To give you some idea of how strong they are, if you played more than half a dozen scales on this saxophone you'd have to stop to rest your hands.

Not that that's likely to happen, because neither the tone holes or the key cups are level - which is academic anyway, as the 'pads' that have been fitted have the consistency of the back of a soft leather armchair, and are about as flat as a boxing glove. I suppose it's a form of 'self-seating' pad - in a "seat 'em yourself" kind of way. To do this you must first overcome the incredible spring tension and then press the keys down almost half as much again to push the soft, squishy pads over the warped tone holes. More often than not the pads on these Indian saxes are bright red colour - but these are a drab brown. Perhaps this is a 'mock vintage' model...

So if you saw one of these in a market, how would you distinguish it from an original Adolphe sax?
Well, as simple as the Adolphes are they're still much better made than this example. The keys will still be relatively crude but they'll be a great deal neater.
You also won't see such modern features as spatula key rollers, such as those seen on the right. You can clearly see that no expense has been spared on the key fittings. To be fair these rollers do actually roll - but they're so thin that you can't get your finger on them. They make a nice rattly sound though.
Perhaps the biggest giveaway is the tone holes - they're drawn. Adolphe's original saxes were built quite some time before that process was commonly used, and his saxes all had soldered-on tone holes.

This is quite a surprise as it's by no means a simple job to draw tone holes out of a tube - and it has me wondering whether these things are made by more than one company. I said earlier that the body wasn't too badly made, and if you add in the drawn tone holes and the contrast them with the quality of the keywork it leads me to suggest that people buy in the bodies from someone who's quite good at making bodies, and then make and fit the pillars and keys themselves.

Does it play?
This example is missing its top Eb key and a couple of pads - but with the addition of a few lumps of Blu-Tack (thus doubling the build quality, and the value of the instrument in one fell swoop) it's just about possible to play a scale from mid to low C - assuming giving up half way counts as a scale. From this it can be determined that the sax is pitched in F, and that in the space of an octave it's completely out of tune with itself.

I'm sure you will all agree that this terrifying exhibit was well worth the small fortune paid to secure its rightful place in the black museum .

That just about wraps up the tour of the Black Museum for the time being - a small but stomach-churning selection of nasties, I'm sure you'll agree. Don't forget too that, for someone, these examples will undoubtedly be 'wallet-churning' too...
Feel free to drop by the Black Museum from time to time, when further horrors will be presented for your edificatory queasification.