yet another clarinet…
The silver-plate clarinet is great, but why stop there? I picked up another clarinet. This one is old and in great need of repair. But, that was what I was looking for. Made it cheap, and gave me an excuse to learn how to do some work on a clarinet.
It’s a Carl Fischer which means it what is often called a “stencil”. That is, it was manufactured by someone, imported by Carl Fischer (of New York) and then stenciled or stamped with Carl Fischer. On the back of the instrument, I can just barely make out the words “Made in Italy” and a serial number, 5536. That basically is meaningless, but it does tell you that it wasn’t made in one of the potentially well known French clarinet factories like Buffet-Crampon or Selmer. Carl Fischer was a pretty well-known importer of instruments in the first half of the 20th century.
So I visited Faith again at Maine Winds and she helped give me some pointers on what to do and set me up with some materials to get going. As you can see from the gallery below, the clarinet started out in pretty rough shape. It’s getting better, but it isn’t done yet. The clarinet had been stained or something with some sort of waxy substance. It may have been lacquer?
Some 0000 steel wool help clean off most of the gunk on the wood as well as helped bring back the shine on the key work.
I also installed new pads and new corks, but I have yet to really play it because it needs new tenon corks in order for me to even put it together. In addition, the tone holes turned out to be deteriorated wood (maybe?) inserts. In addition, the thumb tone hole was completely missing. That one is usually a metal insert.
Faith found a replacement thumb tone hole, so I have it ready to be installed, but I think that may require drilling out the space a bit as the replacement is slightly larger than what had been there before. I don’t want to force it in, because I think it will split the wood. The other tone hole inserts probably need to be recreated from scratch. I need to check in with Faith to find out if the effort and expense is worth it or not.
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- Untouched and in need of some TLC!
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- Missing tone hole insert
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- Missing thumb tone hole insert
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- Left hand tone holes, in need of replacement
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- You can see the crud on the clarinet
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- Right hand tone holes are also in need of replacement
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- More crud
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- Another angle of the lower section
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- You can see the lacquer or whatever was put on the wood in this photo of the bell
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- The keys on this clarinet were very dull and in need of a shine
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- Clarinet put together
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- Another view of the whole thing
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- Removed the keys.
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- Back side of upper half without keys
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- Another view of the upper half without keys
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- Another view of the upper half without keys
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- Barrel with rings cleaned up
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- Barrel with rings cleaned up
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- Bell with lower ring cleaned up
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- Bell with upper ring cleaned up. You can still see the lacquer crud on the wood.
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- Bell with upper ring cleaned up
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- Bell
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- Bell and lower half. You can see the comparison of the metal work on the barrel compared to the lower part.
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- Upper keys newly shined
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- Bell cleaned up with some steel wool!
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- Lower keys shined up
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- Upper half with tone hole inserts removed
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- Upper tone hole inserts
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- Shinier and with new pads
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- Shinier with new pads
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- Looking better, isn’t it?
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- Looking better, isn’t it?
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- Looking better, isn’t it?
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- Looking better, isn’t it?
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- Looking better, isn’t it?
This one was on sale on eBay and it was shiny…so of course being easily distracted by shiny things, I put in an offer. For only $49, it was mine! Turns out to be in really good shape. I took it to my local woodwind repair technician, Faith, at Maine Winds (
