I’m sure some or many of us will have become aware of the twisty horned EMG mk IX that apppared for sale on eBay in 2021.
For those not, let’s jump back to 2019 when it appeared for sale at Bonhams auctions:
The horn had bent double and the case was a little shabby, but overall not too bad and very restorable without any major adaptations, I’ve raised multiple drooped EMG and Expert horns now, however the buyer clearly fancied his luck at fixing, but perhaps should have tried his hand at butchery rather than restoration as when it reappeared on eBay in 2021 it looked like this:
The cabinet had been stripped, poorly refinished in some horrendous rubbery varnish, and the horn, well, it’s not pretty, the collapsed section had been cut out and replaced with a piece of aluminium ducting with fibreglass and epoxy based body filler packed around it 2” thick in areas, it was bad, so twisted and deformed the horn was placed atop a 4” section of steel tubing to allow the lid to open, I bought it, when I picked it up I was told the horn could “use some tidying up”, I think that was the understatement of the century
I couldn’t face it for a while, I had to figure out how to go about fixing it, I cut out the wrecked section, leaving me with a casting and a horn bell, relegated it to the loft, I fixed up the base unit, fitted it with another Mk IX horn I happened to have that lived on my HMV 31, and used it for a while, but as things go sometimes, I had to move it on, so it went.
Cut forward to a couple months ago I was paying a visit to my friend Graham Rankin’s house and on that trip I got to thinking about the Mk IX horn I had in pieces back home.
These horns were originally built around a very complex collapsible former, I was hesitant to go down that route, as I didn’t really need the former to be reusable, so I did a far simpler former, loosely glued together so it could be broken out of the mouth of the horn once complete, made to match the shape of a complete Mk IX horn traced 1:1 from blown up images, reduced to the internal dimensions, the former as seen in these images was wrapped prior to the initial layers to span the gaps and void any internal edges
This is a late horn (1947) and they were still using newspaper in sections even then, under the internal finishing papers
A challenge with EMG horn restoration are the finishing papers, there are no modern alternatives that are a suitable match to the originals, so the only way to sort that that is to go the long way round and make the finishing papers myself, I made a printing block, carved 1,370 scales into it and printed some papers which once treated with a dyed shellac mix, have a remarkable resemblance to the original EMG reptilian horn paper as it is seen now 80 and 90 years later
First picture showing I riginal EMG horn paper used for measurement and design reference, taken from Graham Rankin’s “Krakenhorn” EMG mk Xb Oversize
And finally the finished horn, it was a big restoration project but I’m very pleased with the outcome, all repair work was done in Paper Appliqué, alternating layer colours are necessary in order to show visually when a paper layer is complete, I went as far as using paper the same colours as the original, so should someone theoretically take a saw to it (again) you wouldn’t be able to tell necessarily where the original paper ends and new starts.
I should also note this horn is usually thick and stout for a mk IX horn, much more substantial than the horn i previously owned, it is the same thickness and as stiff as my much larger EMG Mk XA horn, wether this is specifically a post war characteristic or not I’m not sure
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