John EricsonI’m calling this horn the “French” horn project, as the basic horn body is a French style piston horn, as seen below. An eBay find, this is what it looked like out of the box.
The bell is kind of mangled but there are some “good bones” for a nice natural horn.
This type of horn is exactly the type I would like to do this type of project with as well. If it were complete and by a well-known maker, I would not do it. In this case, it’s missing one piston entirely and there are no crooks. But of the basic tubing, most of it can be used, I just have to replace everything in the valve section area, and the bore is .440, perfect for a natural horn.
Look at those nice artistic braces. And the bell size is a good one for hand stopping. This will make a very workable natural horn in the French style. As I write this I have the stuck slides all out and I’m pondering options, I will need to completely rebuild the main slide area, most likely using the tubes from the third valve slide.
Who made it?
As of now it’s a mystery, and it may be one for a long time. The only marking I can find is this “H” stamped on the bell.
H? It is certainly not by a major maker like Hawkes. Most likely it is a “stencil” horn of the time. There are no other markings.
I’m working now on making a good inventory of the natural horn parts I have on hand and what I need to obtain to at least make F, E, and Eb crooks and a D/C coupler for this and the Glassl bell horn. Will be and interesting project.
UPDATE: I’m about to take the horn apart and I figured out that the first slide on the main slide is smaller bore. Horn itself is .440 but that slide is probably .430, maybe .435. I’m hoping I can get .435 to work, as I have a brand new slide I can use. Will see how it all goes.
UPDATE II: A reminder that what you think changes as you look closer. Most of the slide tubes are just over .440 bore, as is the main slide. The first leg of the main slide is a bit under .435 and the tube leading from the crook to that slide tube is .425! I’m going to have to replicate that tube with .440 tubing and use a new socket. But things are coming together, I have done the main dent work and I have all the parts on hand now to make at least the horn body and the (.440 bore!) F and Eb crooks. Onward!
Update 3. As there is plenty of room here for 2 more pictures, below is “before and after” on polishing up parts before assembly.
The polishing method involved sanding the solder off as much as practical, buffing those areas, and then polishing the whole horn — first with Wright’s Copper Cream, followed with Simichrome.
It came out pretty well. The small parts visible were all salvaged from the instrument.
There is a side topic to mention, you can see there is a large patch on the bell tail/throat. That is a vintage patch, and it did not hold water so there was a leak. That took some effort to fix, and honestly it looks rougher than I’d like, but I will just call it “character,” the horn will play fine with the patch. I also had to add two patches to the first branch, two cracks opened up in doing dent work.
Speaking of dent work, the curl of the bell unbent a bit (you can see the parts don’t fit in the photos), one area is especially oval now (in the area of three o-clock in the photo above), so the next step (tomorrow) will be annealing, filling, and bending the bell tail to restore the correct shape. And then on to assembly.