Zombie Frankenstein French Horn.

A fun sideline to my music hobby in recent years has been spotting damaged French horns with good potential on eBay & Craig’s List (& occasionally at flea markets & yard sales), buying some of those, & getting them restored to good playing condition using the services of experienced professional brass instrument repair technicians. I think of it as French Horn Rescue.

It’s easier (& cheaper) if the rescue candidates are complete.  But I hit on a way around that.  I bought a seriously damaged C.G.Conn 6D double horn (keys of F & Bb), in yellow brass, that was so badly smashed it would not fit inside a carrying case.  The bell tail was dented & nearly flattened in places.  The ruined bell flare was bent, patched, dented, creased, & torn at the rim, with a couple of holes upstream of the rim close to the bell throat.  So the double horn was not really complete, in that its ruined 1-piece bell assembly (bell tail + bell flare) was not practical for re-use; necessary repairs were so extensive & would be so labor-intensive that replacing the whole thing was way more practical.  Plus, a key part of the double horn was absent — 1 of its 2 F-side main tuning slides.

Rather than even pricing new replacements (and why put new parts on an old horn?), I bought an eBay age-appropriate yellow brass C.G. Conn single F horn, whose 1-piece bell assembly is compatible with the Conn 6D double horn.  As a bonus, the single horn’s 1-2-3 valve slides also fit the F side of the Conn double horn.  That was important because 2 of the 3 F-side slides on the double horn were dented & would need repair if they were to be kept on the horn.  Instead, the damaged slides were swapped out for OK slides from the single horn.

The single F horn came with a 2nd main tuning slide of extra length, used to pitch the horn in the key of E-flat when the regular tuning slide was taken out & the Eb slide was put in its place.  The Eb slide turned out to be a bonus.  The repair technician used parts off it to fabricate a replacement for the double horn’s missing main tuning slide.

The finished product is a Zombie Frankenstein double horn, back from the dead, that incorporates 2 valve slides, 1 tuning slide, & its 1-piece bell assembly cannibalized off a single horn made in the same factory at about the same time as the double horn.  The resulting creation not only looks good, it plays fine also — good sound, good pitch, good response.

The Zombie Frankenstein horn is not perfect.  No one would mistake it for a new horn.  Except for French horn nerds familiar with lots of little details, people would be apt to take the Z-F horn for a well preserved Conn 6D in excellent condition for its age.  That’s just about what it is, except that it’s well restored rather than well preserved.

There is 1 new part on the double horn, an eBay generic replacement leadpipe (mouth pipe) made to fit Conn 6D.  The original leadpipe was so badly bent & kinked that replacing it made sense.  (Single F horn leadpipe is not suitable as replacement for  F-Bb double horn leadpipe.)

In keeping with the idea of Waste Not & Want Not, the leftover parts — single horn body & Eb slide parts + damaged bell assembly — are on eBay.  Maybe somebody will buy them.  Wouldn’t that be something?