Klarinet Archive - Posting 000776.txt from 1997/11

From: avrahm galper <agalper@-----.com>
Subj: Schreiber and more!
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 08:55:27 -0500

Schreiber and more
Recently a member of the list asked about the clarinets that Schreiber
make.
I asked one of my local dealer friends and here is the information I
received: Schreiber makes B12, E11 and E12.
The B12 is a plastic clarinet. The other two are made of wood that is
supplied to Schreiber by Buffet.
The key work is Schreiber.
The E13 is a regular Buffet that didn't make the grade for some reason.
It's not a Schreiber instrument.
For those that didn't know: Schreiber owns Buffet.
Boosey and Hawkes own Schreiber.
And until recently, Carl Fischer owned Boosey and Hawkes,
The latest story I heard was that Carl Fischer sold Boosey and Hawkes.
The buyer was supposedly Selmer, Indiana. (which is separate from
Selmer, Paris.)
So there!
A few years ago I was privileged to be shown around the Buffet factory
and see some of the mechanized operations going on there.
24 hours a day! Automatic machines cutting parts of keys (that are
later soldered together). Cutting wood, drilling, putting in the holes,
holes for the posts etc. The posts are put in by hand since a machine
wouldn't know the tolerance of the wood.
A continuous operation 24 hours a day!
Manual labor comes in at a later stage. For instance, the fine drilling
of the bore is done by hand with special drills,( carefully guarded.)
Yona Ettlinger, who was a household guest at Buffet, told me that they
have certain drills that they use in a certain sequence. That is why
it's hard to copy them, no matter how carefully measured the clarinets
are by someone else.
There are other tricks of the trade, he told me. They can pass by a
whole case of joints, and by tapping on any one of them, they can tell
which is a good joint.
Reminds one of what Carl Baermann said in his chapter on reed making,
that if one taps on a joint of cane and it has a ring to it, most likely
it's a good piece of cane.
Ettlinger told me that he was quite friendly with Robert Carree. He was
an engineer. Didn't play a note of clarinet. But knew how to calculate
the bore etc.

Should I learn engineering?

Avrahm Galper