Shires water key

[CharlieB]

Help needed from the horn techs..........
The water key lever on my Shires is misaligned with the nipple such that it requires some ingenuity to get it to seal properly. Factory mistake. Either the lever saddle, or the nipple, or both are in the wrong place. Time to fix it properly. What is the correct orientation of the nipple relative to the plane of the slide? Right now, the whole assembly is rotated ~ 30 degrees from the plane of the slide. Is that unique to Shires? Does it matter? My non-Shires horns all have the nipples aligned with the plane of the slide.

[Bonearzt]

The water key should be aligned so that it seals.

Best to have it unsoldered & reset properly, but might just need a slight squeeze with a pair of smooth-jaw pliers to correct.
Doesn't really matter how it's oriented relative to the slide.

Eric

[GabrielRice]

Sometime in the last couple of years Shires redesigned the waterkey lever and changed the way it's made (it's either forged or cast now, I can't remember which). The new ones are sturdier and bend less easily. I can bend the old ones by hand, and with a tool it's really easy. You should be able to bend it into place so that it lines up and seals well. If it's bent beyond recognition, you should be able to get a new one installed.

[CharlieB]

Eric,
Thanks for the reply and the suggestions
It will definitely be unsoldered and realigned properly. It's too far off to fix by bending.

[CharlieB]

Hi Gabe,
Thanks for replying.
This is the same .500 Shires for which you were kind enough to send me a 1.5 tuning slide a few years back.
I still appreciate that you did that, and I'm also still very happy with the horn.

As I replied to Eric, the water key misalignment is too extreme to be fixed by simple bending. Not a criticism of Shires. Sometimes mistakes happen. Resoldering is a simple fix. I just need to decide whether to move the nipple or the saddle. Moving the saddle would be easier, as moving the nipple would require relocating the hole in the slide crook.

Part of my original question was whether an (incorrect ?) location of the nipple mattered. I asked because this horn gurgles much sooner than my other horns. At times that can be very inconvenient. Can gurgling somehow be partly related to nipple location? I don't know.