Client was cleaning their trombone with a snake brush. The end came unscrewed and jammed inside the rotor casing (or came unscrewed because it got caught in the casing, IDK). This wasn’t a huge job, as things go, but it was damn finicky.
The flexible plastic bristles meant it was grabbing the insides of the tubing and couldn’t simply be shaken loose. Blue oval drawn on the last photo above shows where it was caught.
Neither could I just pop out the rotor to remove the obstruction, since the brush was stuck crossways through the entire casing, in one port and out the other. It quite effectively locked the rotor in place. Trying to hammer it out like for a regular rotor disassembly would have completely trashed both the casing and the rotor, and the brush would have probably still been stuck in the resulting mess.
The tubing out one side had a 90° turn a short ways before reaching the rotor casing. I would have needed to unsolder half of the tubing to get the brush out that way, and that was something I wanted to keep as strictly a last resort.
That left me with reaching down through the long straightaway where the main tuning slide goes. None of my pliers or tweezers were long enough, and even if they were I probably would not have been able to open them far enough within the tight confines of the tubing to grab anything, nor would I have been able to see past them to what I was trying to grab.
Time to make a new tool: grab piece of stiff 10-12 gauge steel wire, bend the end into a hook and grind it down into a very pointy claw.
Then came the tricky part: finagling the wire down the tubing and trying to snag the tip of the claw bit in the tiny loop of wire at the end of the brush. (I drew some shitty diagrams to illustrate what was going on.) First attempt was a miss, but I got it on the second shot. Only made it a few millimetres before losing hold of it, but every subsequent grab dragged it out a little bit more, until it was free of being caught around the bend of the valve ports, and slid out easily when I buried the hook into the mass of bristles, and pulled.
Ha. I win.
