What’s the most common avoidable damage you see?

Five habits would prevent most of it: use a sturdy case and treat carrying the cello as part of playing it, run a humidifier in winter, oil brass valves and grease the slides, grease clarinet corks before assembly, and swab the flute every time. Here is what we see when those don’t happen.

After tens of thousands of instruments across the bench, the list is remarkably consistent, and almost everything on it is preventable.

Cello: the drop. The broken cello neck is our most common serious string repair. A violin dropped inside its case almost always survives. A cello in a thin soft bag, dropped from ordinary carrying height, almost never does. Treat carrying the cello as part of playing the cello, and use the sturdiest case you can.

Strings generally: winter dryness. A home dry enough in January will crack an instrument, reliably. A room humidifier where your child practices prevents most of it.

Trumpet and brass: seized from neglect. Pistons and tuning slides that were never oiled or greased, discovered stuck after two years. The slides are the heartbreaker. Left long enough, the metals fuse, and the fix involves heat. A few drops of oil weekly and a monthly minute on the slides prevents all of it.

Clarinet: the dry cork. Cork is tree bark; it dries. A student forcing a dry joint together is how tenons crack and keys bend. Most clarinet damage happens during assembly, not playing. Cork grease, applied when the corks feel dry, prevents it.

Flute: never swabbed. Moisture left inside ruins pads and clogs the instrument, and yes, we can tell.

The pattern across all of it: a little lubrication, a little cleaning, and an occasional visit to the shop for a cleaning. And that visit does more than you’re paying for. When we clean an instrument, we play it, check every key and valve, and catch small problems while they’re still small. Plenty of the repairs on this list started as something a cleaning would have caught a year earlier.