Saxophone Repair Topic: Straightening a Rod

Saxophone repairman Matt Stohrer of http://www.StohrerMusic.com fulfills a viewer request and takes you into the garage (oh man, that is a sweeeet garage) and shows you how bent saxophone rods are straightened.

By the way, this rod is pretty severely bent, which I selected purposefully for the video since a slight bend would not really be visible on the video. Usually rods only have a slight bend in them, and require about 5 seconds of the process in the video- but unless we had done it in HD on a large screen, the difference would have been hard to see.

I also used a bench motor rather than my usual method of a micro-lathe with a collet chuck, since the bench motor method is more commonly used and also probably more accessible to most people than a micro-lathe. However if you do have access to something that will use high-quality collets, you can do a better job than the bench motor and also as a bonus not be in any danger of marring the surface of the rod.