A day at Fox

On my way out to the NAPBIRT conference today, I had the eminent privilege to spend a few hours at the Fox factory with Chip Owen, a legendary member of their staff and of the repair community at large. Chip is a man of few pretenses who seemed only too happy to take a couple hours out of his day to show me around their facility. Ever since I first picked up a Fox oboe 15 years ago in high school I've wanted to visit South Whitley, so I geeked out quite a bit.
Chip is a bassoonist and head of the contrabassoon department at Fox, so most of my time was spent around those instruments. He was kind enough, though, to humor me with a trip through the oboe/english horn rooms, too. The output of the facility is staggering - they have 120 people working on every step of the manufacturing process, from raw logs to finished instruments, and they produce thousands of instruments annually ranging from beginner to the most elite professional levels. As Chip pointed out, they are likely the world's largest manufacturer of bassoons, nestled in a small cluster of building on a rural Indiana road.

We jump right past aging, seasoning, rough shaping, and reaming. There are stacks and shelves of drilled logs sitting throughout the building waiting to be processed, and buildings outside where they age. This stage comes immediately after reaming, where the tenons are cut and the profile of these bass joints has just taken shape.

A few feet away, preformed plastic liners are fitted to wing joints. Pro line instruments get hard rubber liners.

A cut-away shows the installation of the liner.

In the same room, this machine bores bells for bassoons, oboes, and english horns. All other joints have their bores reamed, but bells are too large and irregular for that. There's a bell held snugly inside that steel sleeve.

After the joints are shaped and the liners are installed in the wing and boot joints, they wait here for final sanding and finishing.

In the sanding room, joints are smoothed and then matched together to make an instrument. Up until this point, no joints have been assigned to each other, but from here on out they will stay together as a complete bassoon.

In the tone holing room, a few recesses and holes are cut before finishing. Then the instruments gets finished and comes back here to have the rest of the tone holes and post holes cut.

Tone holes and post holes are cut by hand on a mill. Lying on the bed is a template joint used to set the angle of the drill for each hole. That hole will be drilled in 10 or 20 joints, then the machine gets reset for the next hole, and so on until every hole gets cut on every joint.

The tone holing machine for oboes wasn't running the day I was in, nor was the spellcheck.

Joints in various stages of completion sit throughout the building. Notice that they're all grouped to form complete instruments.

Posts are installed and drilled in this room.

Posts are installed as blanks, then a jig is used to center a long drill that cuts the holes for the screws perfectly parallel or perpendicular to the body.

As the posts are drilled, hinge rods are also fitted. They'll later be removed and have keys brazed to them.

The man himself, explaining post placement and drilling.

Key parts can be cast, forged, or cut. At Fox, the parts are all cut from huge slabs of nickel silver on a set of CNC mills. These are bassoon ring keys, part-way through the cutting process.

After the key parts are cut, they're assembled by hand. The keys for each bassoon are assembled to fit that specific bassoon, so the key finishers have to cut, shape, and file the parts before brazing them together, all the while checking the fit on the joint. Note the guide sitting on the Ab tone hole to center the key cup over the hole.

This room is where pads and corks are installed, then instruments are sent for play testing and adjustment before they're shipped out. Note the work orders sticking out of the bells, indicating whether an instrument has already been purchased and by whom.

I tried to snap a few pictures of the oboe and english horn manufacturing process, but like I said, Chip is a bassoon guru, so we spent a lot more time looking at the heavy artillery.

Oboe and english horn parts after reaming and external shaping. After this they would go to tone holing.

Posts and rods are fitted in the same room with bassoons.

Several oboes getting their keys fitted. After keys are assembled and roughly fitted, they're driven up to Elkhart, IN in large batches to be plated, then brought back the same day or next day for final fitting and padding.

I liked this stack of bell rings.

Oboes waiting for padding.