The Bench @ Keystone: Buffet English Horn Day 20

Today was the day - I had a deadline of 6pm to finish the english horn and play it in a rehearsal. Having mostly leveled the lower joint pads yesterday, I spent the first part of today rechecking all those pads and making final adjustments. Then all the regulation screws went back in and I started the regulation process. Along with that I had to adjust spring tensions, trim and replace corks to adjust key heights, and secure a few posts that kept coming loose. I also got to reinstall the post from that cracked area around the C# tone hole. I tried to reinstall it once before, but the post hole had a good bit of superglue in the threads which meant that the hole was smaller than it had been. When I tried to force the post in to place, it started to crack the wood again. So this time I took a post I no longer needed - in this case the lower post from the C#/Eb lever that I ended up replacing - and cut some slots in the threads so it would work like a tap by cutting away the excess glue and restoring the threads. I just used a Dremel tool with a knife-edge wheel to cut the slots.

After recutting those threads, the post went in nicely, with a little epoxy added to hold it in place. The area that was cracked is pretty much indistiguishable at this point. In the second picture you can just see where one of the cracks started just below the post and extended about an inch to the right. I'm really happy with how it turned out. Thanks to fellow tech Julian Dale Barton for sharing his technique for surface crack repairs.

Finally, with the pads all leveled, the keys fitted and installed, and the preliminary regulations set, it was time to get out my new bocal (a Fox 2XL - a gift to myself for finishing the project) and play this english horn for the first time in who knows how long. And...

It didn't play. Turns out I forgot to check the bridge regulations when I put it together. So I took care of that, took another breath and...

It played! Having never heard it before, I didn't know what to expect, but it actually sounded like an english horn! The tone is somewhat dark. It doesn't have the color that some players might desire, but I prefer a darker sound so this is right up my alley. Of course once I got it playing I realized that the wacky octave mechanism needed more adjustment, and there were a bunch of other regulations that needed tweaking, and the Low C# is really fuzzy (still working on that one), but it works! I was able to play it at rehearsal, and it felt good the entire time.

Of course that's not the end of the story. Over the coming days and weeks, things will settle in and I'll need to continue making adjustments. With an instrument that's sat idle for so long - at least 10 years and probably much longer - there's also the possibility that it may crack, although I suspect that if it was ever going to crack, it would have done so by now. Aside from that surface crack that came from being whacked, it clearly hasn't.

In the next few months I plan to make new octave levers so that I can do away with the automatic octave mechanism. I'd also like to make a left hand F key. I kept reaching for that this evening at rehearsal and finding nothing there. There's also some voicing that needs to be done to really make it sing, but for now it works perfectly well, and more importantly I was able to have it ready on time.

As I continue to tinker with it I'll try to update with more posts, but this part of the saga is over. In 20 days I was able to take a completely non-functional instrument that spent years sitting under a workbench and rehabilitate it into a beautiful instrument that I can take pride in and feel a deep connection to. Every time I take it out to play I can look back on this whole restoration process and know that I'm holding the product of my own sweat and blood. But mostly blood. A surprising amount of blood.

But in reality it wasn't a project I completed alone. I bounced lot of ideas off my coworker, Mike, and he bounced them back when they sucked. I had help from Tim the machinist at Peterson Machine who made the tone hole facers, my coworkers Cindy and Frank who ordered the bocal and case, and a network of incredibly helpful and knowledgeable repair techs who are eager to share what they know. And there's also my old college classmate Debbie, who sold me the instrument (thanks Debbie!) Most importantly, though, I have Steph, my understanding wife who allowed me to neglect her for 20 days while I obsessed over this project from a desk 10 feet away. Seriously, she's pretty incredible, guys.

If you've read any of this, thanks for taking the time! Here's a final before and after.