A day at Bach

OK, it wasn't really a day, it was just an afternoon, after I visited Fox in the morning. They're only about an hour apart, you know.

The Bach plant in Elkhart was originally a Conn factory, but Bach has been here for several decades. Conn-Selmer, their parent company, has their HQ next door and a woodwind plant down the street. Since Blessing stopped manufacturing activities at their plant on the north end of town last year, there are only three plants left - Bach, C-S, and Gemeinhardt flutes.

Though it employs about the same number of people as Fox, the plant is significantly larger, owing to the massive machinery. Brass instruments come together much more quickly from raw material to finished product, but there's a lot more shaping and manipulation of those materials that has to happen along the way.

Press #1, which stamps out small parts for brass instruments and parts for woodwind keys. The factory maintains enough parts for 4 days of production, meaning that any given part goes from raw material to being mounted on an instrument in less than a week.

Unlike at Fox, where all the parts for keys were cut from blocks of nickel, at Bach they're stamped out on presses, then sent down the street to the woodwind plant. 

The draw benches, where tubing is placed on a precisely sized mandrel, then pulled through a lead die to reduce it to the needed diameter.

Across from the draw benches are enormous presses that take large sheets of brass and force them around a mold to make the rough shape of a bell. The excess is cut off and the ends are brought together and brazed , then hand-forming begins. Most makers don't press a shape into the brass like this. The maker would start with a cut piece of flat brass that gets hand-hammered around a forming mandrel and brazed together.

After the ends are brazed together, the seam is pressed together in this machine to make it perfectly smooth. This pressing mostly flattens the bell, so it will then get re-opened on a mandrel. After that it's repeatedly hammered on a forming mandrel and annealed until the desired shape is achieved.

Hand-hammering leaves the bell with a rough faceted surface, so next it gets spun and burnished onto another forming mandrel to smooth out any distortion. You can see the lever and fulcrum used to do hold the burnisher right under this guy's arm. It takes a serious amount of force.
After burnishing, the edge of the bell is partially rolled over, then a wire is soldered in around the whole circumference, and the edge is rolled the rest of the way to completely cover the wire. At this point the shape of the bell flare and stem are complete.

Next the bell is filled with soapy water, frozen to about -180 F, and bent by hand around a bending block to create the curve at the back of the bell. The ice prevents the tube from getting crushed when it's bent. The addition of soap makes the ice somewhat flexible. The freezer is at the left in this picture, and the bending block is on a stand in the middle of the shot.
The traditional medium for bending tubing is pine pitch, which a number of companies and small shops still use, but it's a pain to clean up, while ice can just be melted out.

While the bells are being made, other parts are coming together as well. Valve blocks and rotor casings - which is what's on the stand - are brazed together under very high heat.

Parts are cut-buffed before being assembled to clean the surfaces and prep them for soldering.

Apparently this machine can buff whole instruments. It wasn't running that day, but believe me, it smelled pretty great.

Finished bells wait to be mounted.

After the bodies are soldered together, they come to this room for color buffing and ragging to get a smooth, bright, finished surface.

This woman was soldering slides together. I distracted her and she knocked a brace out of position. Sorry.

Finally, the finished instrument comes here, the lacquer prep room, where it's wiped down and plugged up before going into the lacquer spray booth.

This machine doesn't make mouthpieces, it just buffs them, up to 1000 a day, before they're sent across the street to the plating shop.

After instruments are finished - either lacquered or silver plated, they come back to have the casings honed and the valves fit. This is the final manufacturing step before the instrument is checked and shipped out.

Here's a couple articles about the once-mighty band instrument industry in Elkhart.
One about the Blessing shutdown: http://www.elkharttruth.com/news/business/2014/03/14/Longtime-Elkhart-horn-maker-stopping-production.html
And an older NPR story from when things looked a little brighter:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124583703