GRAND FORKS - When Don Czapiewski spreads the guts of an ailing saxophone on his worn-smooth workbench, it's pretty much a rest-of-the-day commitment.

It's a science, certainly, but it's also art and music, this business of diagnosing and repairing band instruments.

Czapiewski's 40 years at the workbench couples with colleague Deb Roach's two decades of experience for more than half a century's worth of delicate repairs on horns and woodwinds.

There are no newfangled electronics in this workshop, no computerized tone-testers or red needles dancing on gauges - just two sets of perfectly tuned ears and two sets of hands that take mangled trumpets and wheezing flutes and, with a surgeon's precision, heal what ails them.

Czapiewski prefers to work while seated; most of his hand tools have been with him the length of his career. He picks up a tiny ball-peen hammer; its hardwood handle has a sheen only acquired by years of use.

Scattered on his workbench are odd slabs of wood, no larger than a paperback book. There are hole patterns drilled into the wood, and only in the right light can one see the traces of what once was a drawing of an instrument on the surface.

They're screwboards, he says, removing a minuscule screw from a flute and dropping it neatly into a hole on the board. That way, he says, when you take things apart, you know where they go. The flute is bedeviling him this morning, refusing to reveal what precisely is wrong with it.

"Sometimes," he says, "you have to put it down, do something else and come back to it."

He moves the flute parts aside and sets upon the saxophone.

At the other workbench, Roach is cramming a wooden mandrel into a vise. It looks more like a post from a staircase, but she insists it's made for the job.

She's trying to persuade a trombone to slide, as all trombones should. Wielding curved pliers, she grips a bit of curved brass, then taps with a small hammer on a small piece of jammed brass. It obliges and pops free.

Roach says she and Czapiewski says get an enormous range of explanations for what happened to these injured instruments.

A few of them:

"My mom backed over it with the car."

"I sat on it."

"I dropped it."

"It fell in the water."

"Ummm … I don't know."

Czapiewski produces some Polaroids of the instrument hall of shame - a trumpet bent in half, another horn so mangled it was hard to tell its species.

"Sometimes, it would be easier to fix if we knew what really happened," says Roach, the wise mother of four.

She lifts the body of the trombone from the big chemical bath, rinses it with a garden hose and slips it onto the mandrel. A little soldering with an acetylene torch, a little spray of water, and she whips a long strip of wicking coated with claylike polishing compound around the tubes as if it were dental floss.

She slips the innards into the outards: It slides like a dream.

She's pleased.

Roach reaches for a can of her supersecret instrument-shining recipe: lemon furniture polish. It's true.

She grins.

With the lemony-fresh trombone back in its case, she signs off on the repair tag tied by string to the handle.

Roach and Czapiewski came to their handiwork by different roads.

Roach got a college degree in music, but with that in hand, she decided she didn't want to teach. Instead, she went on to the instrument repair program in Red Wing, Minn. She went into business for herself for some 15 years before coming to Grand Forks and joining Popplers music store four years ago.

Czapiewski learned the hands-on way, with no formal training at the outset. He knew someone at the music store and, in his quiet manner, talked his way into the job. He was one of those precocious kids who took things apart - radios, small machines - but Czapiewski always preferred the more intricate machines: the smaller the parts, the better.

They average five to eight instruments a day, they both guessed, although Czapiewski says he's never tallied his conquests.

At that rate, over 40 years, Czapiewski has repaired and restored some 60,000 flutes, bassoons, trumpets, French horns, tubas, piccolos, trombones, clarinets, saxophones, euphoniums, oboes and cornets.

Amazingly, though, his hands are clean when he comes in every morning. Roach's, too.

By noon, they're blackened with lubrication and grime. They work quietly, with talk radio on low in the background.

Czapiewski comes back to the troublesome flute with a fresh idea, and it works. In moments, it's in working order again, the screws plucked carefully from his handmade screwboards.

The big clock in the shop - the one with the big yellow-suited drum major - lines its hands up at the 12.

Czapiewski wipes his hands.

"Time for lunch," he says.

The saxophone will still be there when he gets back.