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Back more than ten years ago I posted a short article an interesting old Huttl horn. It was one obtained from a former teacher and dates to the early 20th century. As I say in the earlier article, I always felt the instrument had some potential, it has a very nice gusseted, hand-hammered bell, but nevertheless did not play well. Previous owner had it out as display item, as did I.
But I prefer playable horns. For years my thinking was the big problem was the leaky valves, and early in my sabbatical I thought about going big and replacing the valve section. But looking at it more with new eyes after the sabbatical project, the horn had evidence of a lot of repairs over the years. As with the Geyer single horn project horn, repairs had been hidden somewhat with a fresh coat of lacquer. In the case of this Huttl, there were things like braces sitting on braces, and especially there was a big and highly suspect patch about 3” down the leadpipe. I think it had been broken off or intentionally cut to achieve a repair. To test if this was the big issue, I tried the horn with different leadpipes, and the horn clearly perked up with a change of leadpipe. So the big issue was that patch area.
The unusual design of this horn is part of the charm of the instrument, but that design also makes for a very unusual leadpipe design, with bends on multiple planes. Looking over parts on hand, what made the most sense was to take about 10” of a King single horn leadpipe (that tested well on the horn) and bend it to mate up with existing leadpipe. Those first inches are the most important tapers of the horn. I got it all cut well, and then, no good deed goes unpunished! I tried to work some dents out of the remaining Huttl pipe and a crack opened up. So, I also had to patch that. And the brace on the main slide was missing, I replaced that as well.
Just before it got really hot here, I got it all together and cleaned up. I was going to ultrasonic clean the valves, but then made a discovery — they are hollow valves! Valves are normally made from solid brass stock, but these were instead assembled from brass tubing and shapes. They are very light weight, and have some suspect cracks — so I did not want to submerge them to clean them. Fortunately they were pretty clean to begin with, but they are worn, so much that I’m able to use light bearing and linkage oil instead of valve or rotor oil as the primary oil — which works surprisingly well.
There was an existing patch at the edge of the bell that was loose, and in testing the horn it created a buzzing noise on certain notes, so that patch was also given some extra attention.
Bottom line is the horn plays! I am pleased, nice intonation and a nice high range. I’m really interested to get all of the recent project horns in a good room and compare the tone qualities. I suspect this one will do well.
This is my last horn project for a while. It is too hot to do any real work in my shop, as overnight lows are in the area of 80 or higher. It will be well into the fall before I do more horn building, but it has been quite an interesting project and change of pace.
Finally, I should mention what I did not do on this horn. It should be clear from the photos, I did not try to fix everything. A horn this old, you start trying to fix things that are not broken to the point of being an acoustic problem and you will open up cracks and create problems, a lesson learned with the leadpipe work. It has a number of dents that I don’t intend to work on ever, the danger of cracks is very real. I might take off the lacquer at some future point to improve the look (it should come off easily), but for now I’ll leave it like it is.
To be honest, I’d be interested in someday making another horn following this design from modern parts. I suspect a horn of this type has potential to be a fine playing horn. For now though I’m enjoying having it in the rotation of vintage single F horns I’m using for my warmup and summer practice.
