Brunswick Parisian horn restoration

[Curt A]

I recently acquired a rare Brunswick Parisian paper horn, which was described as being restorable with just "some gluing and ironing". Needless to say, that was not exactly the case. The horn had some previous attempt to keep it from falling apart and would have been better without that attempt. Twenty years ago, this horn would not only be unrestorable, but would be a candidate for trashing. I am attaching pics of the horn in the condition that I received it, and then my solution to restore the front of it, since the back was not too bad...

[Phonofreak]

Curt, What a fantastic job you did. You were able to rescue a rare item and restore it to perfection. Please share your technique.
Harvey Kravitz

[Curt A]

Harvey,

The process is an involved one, but can be accomplished by anyone well versed in PhotoShop.

Short summary of process:
The first step is to assess the image and find the portion that is most complete and undamaged. Since the back side of the horn was best, I used scans from that portion. The image was too large to scan on a regular flatbed scanner, so I decided to scan ⅓ of the best part of the image. That portion was put into PhotoShop and cleaned up – all glue marks, dirt, cracks, etc. were cloned out of the image.

Then I scanned the area of the logo on the front side and did the same with it. Since the wording on the logo was blurred from age, I removed it completely and re-inserted new text of the same typestyle. The final image was cropped and the existing background removed, leaving the logo only.

Since the horn image was larger than standard paper size, a new blank document had to be created approx. 17”x17”. Once that was done, the cleaned up ⅓ image was pasted into the new document and rotated into position. This was repeated 3 times to obtain a complete circular image and edges were overlapped and cloned to match, leaving a seamless joint where the parts came together.

Finally, the logo was inserted and pasted into position on the document in the correct place. The whole image was saved as a PDF file and printed on a large format printer using mat finish vinyl as the media. The vinyl allows the image to be pasted onto the original horn and gives it additional strength and flexibility. This was then cut out with an X-Acto knife and placed on the original front of the horn.