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Welcome back to my home bench, where I had the pleasure of working on this little beauty! This horn came to us with some bell damage, but other than that all it needed was a clean and polish. The bell is nice and straight now, and though it does show signs of repair, it’s in excellent playing condition! Compression is good with Berp #2 oil, and it really is a fantastic player. Though it is a large bore and a free-blowing horn, thanks to Schilke’s step bore it doesn’t feel like a typical large bore horn. With a heavy all...

Hey brass fans! I wasn’t planning on doing a post on this particular horn, but it turned out to be a bit more exciting than I thought it would! It makes me wish I had taken "before" photos of this one. > Sometimes when you start work on a horn, it just reveals more and more problems as you go. Other times, it just gets better and better! This horn was just one pleasant surprise after another. It started out super dirty and tarnished, so tarnished that I had no idea what was underneath! I saw patches of yellow that...

Welcome back to my home bench, where I have a couple of vintage beauties waiting for you! These Conn 80A cornets are a lot of fun - great players, and can go from a super dark and velvety sound to bright and trumpet-like depending on your choice of mouthpiece. The two pictured here are from 1947 and 1921. The 1921 model is convertible to A, with slide markings to pull to for tuning. Conn cornets built before 1950 work best with short shank cornet mouthpieces, though a long shank actually doesn’t fit too badly or change intonation much, surprisingly! Both...

Welcome to my home shop! I’m currently working from home, and since my home tooling is limited to trumpet and guitar repairs, you’ll see lots of great trumpets and corners in the weeks to come. This horn is a real beauty, and came to us from a recent estate buy. It cleaned up better than expected, and is quite the player, too!  This one, though worn, is in full gold plate with lovely engraving and includes original case, mouthpiece, and gold plated mute. While it’s not in perfect condition and shows a lot of hand wear, it is still very...

Recently, I had a chance to do an overhaul on a Conn 28M. Conn is such an interesting company to me, particularly in how they designed their saxophones. Each new model would always take traits from those that came before, while simultaneously making huge additions. In other words: borrowing what worked, tweaking what could have been better, and always introducing something new and massive. This is in essence nothing out of the ordinary for saxophones of this era, but it always seemed like Conn pushed the envelope into further and further extremes with the kinds of mechanics they would develop,...