Expert: Kenton Scott - 12/26/2006

Question
I have a Cortois Horn.  With piston valves. On the backside of the Valves there is a #9 on valve 1, a #7 on valve 3, and on valve 2 there is #8, below that the word 'paris' and below that the number 111. There is an F and E-flat crook for the lead pipe. The bell is 10.5 inches across.

Can we find about when this was made? How would one assign a value to it?

John  

Answer
Hi John,

The 7, 8, 9 are simply assembly numbers so the workers can keep track of which valve goes with which casing.  

As far as determining age, etc. on it, I will refer you to:  http://www.horn-u-copia.net/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?board=Courtois
for a discussion on making sense of Courtois instruments.

John,

I'm sorry you are dissatisfied with my answer.  I  will point out that I state in the header that I do not attempt to do evaluations on this site, so that part of your question was ignored.  As to referring you to Horn-u-copia.net for further information, I saw no need to re-type the discussion in here when you could read it there.