My Latest Project

So a few weeks ago we were spending another Saturday working on cleaning out Dad's house, and I went up into the attic areas of the garage. There was this odd old box, and when I opened it, there was a saxophone in it. I brought it home and naturally turned to Google. After some searching around, I'm pretty sure it's a 1921 Buescher stencil, made for Wurlitzer. What's really unusual (at least these days) is that it's a C-melody instrument. It's slightly smaller than a tenor sax, but it plays in C rather than in B♭.

The natural questions is "what condition was it in?" Not surprisingly, it was very tarnished. The palm keys were representative of how the whole horn looked:

After a first pass with the silver polish, the horn looked like:

There was also some damage to the neck. As sometimes happens, the end of the neck gets pulled down bending it near where it attaches to the horn. This one was bad enough that a crease had begun to form:

I started by applying the usual technique of pushing the end back up a little. But I didn't want to make things worse, so began to take a little more serious approach. First I made a form that I used to press the outside of the neck to reshape it. That combined with a little encouragement from the inside made things somewhat better. It's still by no means perfect, but it's better than it was. And after being polished more thoroughly and getting new cork, it looks like:

The next steps were replacing four springs and working on the palm keys. They had the pads that were in the worst shape. Surprisingly, a lot of the pads, especially the lower ones, were in pretty good shape. So after putting new pads and new cork, and some serious polishing, they look like (compare this to the first picture):

Another pass at polishing the large areas of the horn also improved its appearance:

Finally, it looks good enough to take a close look at the front etching. Though this instrument was made by Buescher, it was labeled a Wurlitzer:

Obviously it's nowhere near being finished, but it's to the point where it's mostly playable. After other things (i.e. job) gets sorted out, I plan to do a full pad replacement. At that time, I'll clean all the little bits and crevices that I can't clean well now. I'll also replace the missing cork and set it up at that time. Long term plans include a new mouthpiece and possibly a replacement for the neck. If I get really carried away, I may take a crack at re-plating the keys where the silver plating has rubbed off. But playing it takes priority over appearance.