Trombone (or any other brass instrument really) construction material
I'm not really sure where to post this question:
As a trombone player, I've never understood why aluminum is never used in brass instrument manufacturing. It's seldom mentioned on the internet as well. Mutes and such are often made with aluminum and there's no problem with workability there. Even small things like cross-braces are never aluminum.
And I don't think is a cost issue (if anything, isn't aluminum cheaper than brass?).
Sterling silver is used on a lot of trombones bells ("king silvertone"), so it can't be a cost issue.
Is it a durability issue? Aluminum can be very resistant to distortion (bike frames). In my experience, aluminum mutes (one of those cup/straight jo-rals) are extremely well built, so durability doesn't seem like an issue.
My guess is that it's a sound issue. Would an aluminum instrument sound too shrill? I always thought at the end of the day, material still makes less of an impact to the sound than shape does.
Am I just missing something really obvious??
Thanks for any replies. This question has been bugging me for a while.
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Aluminum is an excellent engineering material and easy to machine, but high quality brass instruments are assembled and finished by hand, and aluminum is not so well suited to hand working.
Parts like mutes, with relatively simple shapes, can be "mass produced" easily and accurately by standard machine tool operations like die casting, extrusion, etc.
Brass is more ductile, and much easier to shape by hand hammering, etc.
The surface finish of aluminum might also be an issue. Though it may not affect the tone much, aluminum is a very reactive metal and the surface is always covered with a self-healing layer of oxide, which is difficult to polish and easy to scratch. This permanent oxide layer also makes it hard to finish the instrument by silver-plating, etc, and hard to hand-solder or braze without using higher temperatures than for brass.
In contrast to aluminum, brass is to some extent self-lubricating when used for moving parts like tuning slides, etc.
The surface of aluminum can be easily colored permanently by "anodizing", but that is not very useful for a traditional-looking instrument.
Aluminum has been used for "wind instruments" where appearance doesn't matter, for example large organ pipes - but even then zinc is usually preferred, because it is easier to attach the soft-metal parts of the pipe (alloys of tin and lead) which need hand adjustment for regulating the tone and tuning the pipe.
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