Monthly Archives: March 2021

New cork on my clarinet

Crisis - a piece of cork on my clarinet broke, and it needs to be repaired. Furthermore, I don't want to bring the clarinet in for repair in a shop in Denmark. First of all, there isn't a shop nearby, so I have to drop the clarinet off one day and pick it up the next, which isn't optimal. Second, I was quite disappointed when I had the cork on my saxophone neck replaced a couple of years ago.

Last fall, I attended the Virtual Saxophone Workshop, which was arranged by Chad LB. One of the sessions was about saxophone repairs and was held by Jay Metcalf, who is a professional musician and repairman. He showed how to change the cork on a saxophone neck. I studied the video and thought that it didn't look that difficult to do. Actually, it would be easier to change the cork on my clarinet than changing the cork on a saxophone neck.

Luckily, I had all the ingredients needed for the repair: A hobby knife, a ruler, a piece of cork, contact cement, and sanding paper. The result can be seen in the picture and I'm very proud of the result - especially because I did it in 1 try.

The ingredients for changing cork on a clarinet
Before the repair
The result after changing the cork on my clarinet
After the repair - well done, right?

Another wire stripper

Earlier this year, I bought a wire stripper that works perfectly. However, I haven't found out how to use it to remove the outer insulation, so I decided to look for a wire stripper for that purpose.

When I received the wire stripper, I couldn't get it to work as expected. I talked to a friend and told him that I couldn't get it to work and that I was sure that I did something wrong. My friend didn't believe me, but heI would have a look at it.

Sometimes I feel very stupid even though I shouldn't, since I'm not born with the knowledge of how everything works. It didn't take my friend 1 minute to show me what I was doing wrong. I expected to be able to remove, for example, 5 cm of outer insulation in one piece. That's not possible because it requires a lot of force to move that much insulation. Instead, you have to remove smaller pieces, and then the wire stripper works like a charm.

My friend also took a look at the first wire stripper I bought, and he also showed me how to remove outer insulation with that - damn. But I'm still happy that I bought the new wire stripper because it is more suitable for removing outer insulation than the old one.

Wire stripper

Wall stickers

Last year I decorated a room that I can use for playing music when the living room gets too hot in the summertime. One thing I don't like in the room is the color of the walls. The color is very light green, and it is difficult to see the green color, so it more or less looks like a dirty white color. It helped a little when I put a blue sofa and a couple of small brown tables in the room.

I'm considering getting someone to paint the walls in a different color. Until I make a final decision on that, I've found some wall stickers.

After a couple of hours of work, I'm proud of the result. It looks much better than I expected, and it entirely changes the impression of the room. At the moment I don't want to change the color of the walls.

Wall decorated with stickers

T-shirts from Amazon

Usually, I buy The Mountain T-shirts. I don't like solid color T-shirts because I think they are boring and have no soul. The Mountain T-shirts typically have animal and nature motives, and it's fairly easy for me to find motives and colors that I like.

At the moment I need some big T-shirts that I can wear when sleeping. I don't want The Mountain T-shirts for that purpose since they are not cheap. Therefore, I started looking for T-shirts at my favorite shopping site - Amazon.

To my surprise, I quickly found some T-shirts that I liked, so I purchased two. Currently, I've tried out one of the T-shirts, and I like the fabric very much, so the purchase was a success. I now have to find a couple of T-shirts more and then I'm set for the next couple of years.

T-shirt
T-shirt