During my 2021 sabbatical from Arizona State I worked on horn building projects, documented in a category here in Horn Matters.
The final horn I worked on that spring, it was a bonus horn, done using parts I had on hand with the idea of making a Germanic style, large crooked valved horn — combining a Yamaha single horn with crooks reworked from Chinese natural horn crooks. The horn as it stood then is described in this article.
After that, I worked up another crook — it ultimately had crooks for G, F, and Eb — and the horn played pretty well, especially so with the G crook. But by 2025 I had reduced the horn to parts, I actually used the bell to fix another horn.
The conversion horn, version 2
Looking at the parts this year, I had parts to put it back together again, plus I had an idea: the horn needed a better F crook. If you go back to the original article, you can see the F crook was a just big loop, single coil. It really needed to be coiled more tightly.
I wanted to modify the G crook — and actually damaged it in the process. But I still had enough other parts to make a new crook, using the same front end piece, so it plays the same. The crook in process is seen below.
At this point I’ve made at least a dozen crooks. As a model for the horn, I had the crook seen below, which is from another of the sabbatical project horns. It was about 1 inch too short I figured, but actually probably more than 2 inches. Oh well. It still works fine.
Skipping a few steps, we end up with this final result below.
A crooked Yamaha single
From the back you can see how the crook sits in the body of the horn. It’s not a copy of anything specific, but follows the general principles of the late 19th century. The crook, I should mention, is .440 bore, but the horn body is .472. To make that work a portion of the original leadpipe sits in the section between the crook and the main slide, bringing it up to bore smoothly.
As the horn stands now it has a solid F crook and a good Eb crook, enough for anyone to get the feeling of playing a period valved horn! And it all fits neatly in a Yamaha single horn case. If I do any more to the horn it will just be to remove the remaining lacquer on the horn body and the Eb crook. Fixing this up again was a fun postscript to the entire sabbatical project.
