 Valentino Makes a Stand!
Almost every flutist or clarinet player has a horror story about watching in nightmarish slow motion as their instrument (for lack of a proper place to rest it) tumbled or tipped from a chair, table or some other precarious perch and wound up on the floor, bent, bruise, battered or broken altogether. It happens more often than anyone would care to admit, but it doesn’t have to if you’ve got a reliable stand. Of course most stands really aren’t that solid and we can tell you about a whole lot of musicians who’ve had the same slow-mo nightmare watching their instrument stands going over with an accidental kick or bump. It gives us the willies just thinking about it, so the product development team at J.L. Smith decided it was time to develop an elegant, versatile stand that musicians could rely on to safely hold and protect their instruments from accidental disasters.
After considerable development and testing we’ve created The Valentino Instrument Stand: the ultimate stand for flutes, piccolos, alto and base flutes and clarinets. Of course, we had to give it the extra features and flexibility that would make it worthy of the Valentino brand, so the Valentino Instrument Stand comes in two sizes (the smaller is configured for one or two instruments and the larger holds up to three) and each has interchangeable pegs that can be arranged according to your needs for a single instrument or any combination of two or three. The piccolo peg is designed to hold your piccolo at the same height as your flute, so you don’t have to hunch over to reach it. Best of all, the stand is sturdy and secure with a solid metal base that helps prevent accidental tipping and machined Delrin™ pegs that won’t scratch or dent your instrument. Don’t wait to have your own horror story to get one of these fantastic stands. Order yours today and see just how nice it is to go nightmare free.
Every now and then a tool comes along that is so well conceived and so effective at speeding the work process, elevating the quality of work and improving the quality of life for technicians in general, that it radically changes they way they work forever. JLS Flute Blocks are absolutely one of these rare tools. A fantastic way to hold any flute safely and securely while assembling, padding and adjusting, Flute Blocks leave your hands free to do the actual work. They keep the flute off the bench, reducing inadvertent scratches and keeping the instrument clean. The innovative design allows for full 360º access that makes feeler use a breeze while milled slots give you easy screwdriver access to the footjoint screw, D-key and trill key pivot screws. The design also allows for easy leak light insertion. The blocks can be used to hold the flute body with or without the footjoint attached or the cradle block can be used with the base plate to securely hold the footjoint separately. If you’re not working with Flute Blocks then you’re working one handed, which means you’re working at half efficiency. Order a couple sets today and discover the serious advantages they bring to your bench. We have a 100% satisfaction guarantee to back our promise that once you use them you’ll never want to go back to working one handed again.
It seems like such a simple thing but the repair tags that technicians use to label instruments make a huge difference to the organization and workflow in the shop. We know technicians who’ve told us that their shops went from mayhem to well managed just because they ordered repair tags from J.L. Smith, and quite frankly, if it weren’t for these purpose-built musical instrument repair tags our own shop would no doubt descent swiftly into complete chaos. We offer both, standard tags or custom tags with your company’s information pre-printed. Both styles contain all the necessary fields for tracking and tallying services on band, orchestral and fretted instruments. These intelligently organized repair tags may very well be the only thing standing between ordered civilization and total anarchy in your shop, so get a decent supply and stop the madness before it starts.
Brilliant bodywork is a serious moneymaker for those technicians who have the right tools to make the fixes easy, fast and accurate. Investing in a broad assortment of expert level dent rods and balls makes absolute sense to anyone who knows just how easy and profitable this side of the repair industry really is when you have access to the exact tool for a specific type of dent. Our dent rods are custom designed by our own expert technicians; elite professionals with decades of bodywork expertise who know exactly what works and what doesn’t in every imaginable situation. Unlike other sets on the market, our dent rods are superior grade stainless, finished to perfection in-house by our own team and our ball sets use highest-grade stainless and hard chrome alloys. Essentially we’ve design our own “dream set” of bodywork tools and made them available to technicians everywhere who want to increase revenues and elevate the quality of work they do for their clients. From compound creases to the sharpest dings in the tightest elbows, we have the right tool to handle it. And since we are one of the very few manufactures who make and finish our own tools, in America, in our own shop, using top-flight machinists and mechanical finishers, we know exactly what goes into these exceptional tools and can proudly stand behind them with our 100% satisfaction lifetime guarantee. Order a complete set today or get the specific rods and balls you need to fill out the set you’ve begun collecting.
Every flute model has a unique geometry and subtle differences in the position and size of the tone holes have a tremendous effect on the intonation, responsiveness and overall performance. As you might expect, the specifics of those variations have, by and large, remained a big mystery to most players and technicians. Of course, we’ve always figured that mysteries are there to be solved and that musicians and techs should have the tools they need to understand every aspect and nuance of the instruments they play or service. That’s why we developed ultimate tool for identifying the exact location of tone holes on any flute. The Flute Scale Story Stick is a simple two-piece tool that allows musician and technicians to precisely measure and analyze the positioning of tone holes along the entire length of the flute body. It’s impressively accurate and incredibly simple to use and once you have it in your kit you’ll never have to wonder or guess about the geometric specifics of any flute. The ultimate flute-geek tool? Possibly, but then again, we’ve got an entire company of flute-geeks working day and night to develop new tools and accessories, so give us a couple of weeks and we’ll come up with something even geekier.
Valentino Q-Felt is a dense material with dozens of different uses. We recommend Q-Felt as the very best alternative material to use on keywork where you might have used felt or cork. It’s soft to the touch and very forgiving. It’s also dimensionally stable so it doesn’t lose its shape with use. Some other great attributes of Q-Felt are that it won't get hard with age so it stays responsive and super quiet, and it can be used with a wide variety of adhesives (we typically use contact cement). We’re also very pleased to report that Q-Felt is environmentally responsible and made entirely of recycled materials. Since we control the dimensions in our fabrication processes, the thickness is dialed-in finer than was ever possible with ordinary wool felt. Because of it’s physical properties and dimensional accuracy, Q-Felt is fast becoming the material of choice for some manufactures and we provide it to many of the most rigorous and particular factories and workshops around the world. Try it yourself and you’ll see why.
This versatile and easy-to-use tool gives you an incredibly fast and effective way to locate all types of leaks in any model of flute. The Flute Leak Isolator is inserted into the flute tube to various depths to seal off and isolate particular tone holes and keys pads along the length of the instrument. Used together with the Mag Machine™ even the tiniest leaks are easy to identify and locate in seconds. If you’ve got a Mag Machine you need this tool! If you don’t have a Mag Machine you need both! Seriously, this is one of those great tools that pays for itself the first few times you use it and earns you money every time you put it to use to locate leaks in a fraction of the time it takes with other methods, or to quality check pad work before it goes to the customer. We use ours dozens of times every day to speed diagnostics and check work, so we know for a fact there’s no better or faster method for isolating leaks. Order one and test it. If you’re not completely thrilled with the speed and accuracy… well, you know we stand behind every tool we build and your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed.
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Please feel free to contact us with any questions about any of our products or services at 800.659.6073 or check out our web site at www.jlsmithco.com.
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