Maintain School Instruments : Two Repairmen Get Rich Sound With Little Money

The bow for a violin is almost always made of blond horse hair. Always has been, always will be.

But it doesn’t have to be.

“This is $375 a pound,” said Mack Kavanaugh, pointing to a tassel of blond horse tail.

“But this,” he said, slapping a clump of brown hair, “is $55.”

Kavanaugh, an instrument repairman for the Evansville-Vanderburgh County schools, has become an expert on producing rich sound for little money. With some dye from his wife’s beautician, he plans to bleach the brown horse hair to look just like the more coveted blond.

Kavanaugh, 63, and his partner, Louie Haas, are responsible for maintaining the school system’s 5,000 band instruments and 300 pianos.

On a recent visit, Kavanaugh was wracking his brain trying to figure out how best to remove the Super Glue a helpful father had spread on his daughter’s cello while busying his hands pounding dents out of a tuba bell.

“There’s no such thing as a typical day,” said Haas, 64. “I don’t know how many instruments we repair in a year.”

“More than 1,000,” Kavanaugh guessed.

“Probably you could make it 1,500 and it wouldn’t touch it,” his partner replied.

Haas was busy pounding metal bars into a bass drum-carrying unit for a marching band. The carriers cost $150 in stores, but Haas makes them in his spare time.

Kavanaugh repairs strings and brass, while Haas handles reeds and brass. They share percussion, and both improvise constantly.

“You can’t read this in a book,” Kavanaugh said, pulling out a homemade brace for the sticky cello. “You just pick it up. You look for shortcuts. Every job is more or less a challenge.”

Apparently they are meeting the challenge. Kavanaugh said he hasn’t had to scrap a stringed instrument in 15 years.

The music industry assumes a 10- to 12-year life span for school band instruments, Haas said, but his students still use some saxophones from before World War I.

The veteran instruments don’t necessarily look like new, however. The tuba Kavanaugh was working on had some dimples left in it when he was finished, and a violin ready to go back into service was missing a piece of wood.

“What we want to do is make them play,” he said. “They may look beat up, but they play. We just don’t have time for cosmetics.”

Kavanaugh can play none of the instruments, but believes that that is no handicap in his line.

“That’s not essential,” he said. “I’m a repairman.”