Over the years we have made several top action rotary instruments, but none was a cool (and good) as the instrument We are working on at this moment in time. No more “is this a ganschhorn?” questions…. 

Made a roller tool and an inner mandrel for producing new parts for our top action flugelhorn which we call the Twugelhorn. Sometimes it takes a few days of tool making to be able to produce -exactly- what we want instead of using “generic” parts available from commercial suppliers. This is how we produce unique instruments. This was a lot of work but worth the effort!

We have managed to program our cnc lathe to cut a mouthpiece rim, cup and throat. Very precisely…

Next up is setting up for the threaded parts of the mouthpieces since we have the wish to offer them “warburton” style with seprate tops and backbores.

There isn’t always time to maintain this part of the website. But stuff had surely been happening. Besides the regular work on instruments we have been very busy working on the cnc lathe and the process of “scanning” existing mouthpieces to reproduce on the CNC machine. The CNC adventure is very time and money consuming and has a steep learning curve. In the pic you can see how the tool offset process is organized.

The recently acquired milling machine has been in use for a few weeks. This week we have added a digital readout system to it. This is another one of these jobs done after normal worktimes.

Drilling and tapping into a nice machine like this to fit the modern parts is a bit stressful. But it is done! This makes working with it a lot easier and faster. We hope that maybe in the xmas holidays it is possible to give the machine a fresh coat of industrial lacquer.

We upgraded our main lathe with new -swiss made- toolholding. These are the actual toolholders. They clamp onto the so called Mother-block that we already cleaned and is already mounted onto the lathe. We used to have a collection of asian tools for this that were pretty well made but not repetitively accurate enough to program their positions in the Digital Readout system. This set is of better quality and comes all from the same factory and should solve the “problem”. We got them used and spent a few ours to clean and grease it all up. Nothing as satisfying as blackened steel that has a film layer of machine oil on it.

The “new” mill has been installed! Now comes the process of sorting all the accessories out, and prepping the machine for a new coating of industrial grey paint. A great new machine for making tooling and parts. we love these old, sturdy machines…

If you scroll down a little you’ll see the drawing of this tool holding table. It was produced by a local business and We are very happy with it. It is a huge upgrade to the machine. The block mounted on top needs some holes bored into it to hold boring tools for rims and cups. On the “ears” of the table another type of tool wil be mounted to turn outside diameters/shapes.

We are still in the setup process for the CNC lathe. We picked up a big 48” HD monitor to improve workflow. No more squinting at a small screen :)

Been working on more part drawings for the cnc lathe. This drawing will be made into real steel parts soon. It is the toolholding table for the new cnc lathe that we are setting up for so called “gang tooling. Steps in the right direction!