[TPIN] Schilke Factory

[Achias1 at mchsi.com]

Last Monday I had the great pleasure of visiting the Schilke/Naumann factory in 
Melrose Park, IL.

I had called earlier to make sure that it was OK and Andrew Naumann replied that 
he wouldn't be there, but his sales manager would help me out.

Although being extremely busy because he was packing up the showroom and heading 
to the Texas Bandmasters convention, the sales manager, Phil Baughman was extrememly 
accomodating to me and my family. He delayed packing up the showroom so we could see it and so I 
could try natural trumpet mouthpieces, and he gave us a tour of the production room that was twice as 
long as the 45 minutes that he had planned.

One of the more interesting parts of the tour was watching a craftsman make a 
bell. The bell blanks are made elsewhere then finished at the Schilke plant. There were rows of brass, 
rose brass, berylium, copper, and solid silver bells waiting for finishing. Seeing the bead being 
formed was also really interesting.

The other item that impressed me was the making of the valve cluster. I always 
thought that a lonely guy would sit at a torch and braze all of those little pieces until the cluster 
was finished. What actually happens is that the cluster is assembled and held together with wire before 
being put into an oven with all of its cluster buddies where the pieces are all brazed at one time. The 
ends of the tubing actually extend into the valve casing at this time, and are trimmed off later.

 The final item that I learned is that the instruments don't get the slides and 
valves fine-tuned until they come back from Anderson Plating. I previously thought that the plating was 
the final step.

The entire tour was extremely interesting to me and I thank Phil for taking the 
time from his very busy schedule to show us around. Thanks also to the individual craftsmen, many of 
whom also took the time to explain to us what they were doing.

Also of interest: Schilke is now making trombones at the Melrose Park plant. 
They seem to have a Thayer valve on them.

New at the plant was a pair of machines that make mouthpieces. One takes brass 
rod and makes the blanks, the other finishes them. The final finishing is still done by hand.

The other reason that I went to the factory was to try to find a mouthpiece that would make my Meinl & 
Lauber natural trumpet actually sound like a trumpet. It always sounded like tin to me and I was hoping 
that a Naumann mouthpiece would make it sound like a trumpet. After trying all of Andrews 
mouthpieces on it and also trying them on a Naumann nat (the showroom one was missing a leadpipe, 
so Phil had one of the guys whip one up in about 5 minutes) I determined that my Meinl & Lauber is a 
nice-shaped piece of tin which, heretofore will only be used to show kids what the king of instruments 
looked like in its heyday. If anyone plays a M&L nat that actually sounds like a trumpet, please contact 
me so maybe I can figure out what the problem with mine is.

Sorry for the long post,

Dave