Jay McAllister's Martin CC

[SousaWarrior9]

Hi all,
I recently had the opportunity to purchase the Martin rotary CC that once belonged to the great Jay McAllister. There have been a few older threads I'm aware of where this horn has been mentioned, such as the following:
viewtopic.php ... 94ddf283ba
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=94003
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=62006
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=52845
But even with this available discussion, I still feel I have more questions than answers regarding the history of this horn.
Some details that are still fuzzy:

-The specific year of manufacture: I know based on when Martin offered rotary valves as an option, as well as the shorter wrap, that it is at least mid 20s or earlier, likely in the 19-teens, but the lack of serial number makes it hard to place specifically

-The time and/or place of the cut: It's clear that this horn is a cut down BBb especially looking at some of the particularly short slides and some brace feet on said slides that are cut partway through. The question I'm asking is who did the cut, and when. I had heard several times that is was cut at the factory as a custom order, but I've also heard from some who have worked on it (and whose opinion I very much trust) that it was cut after the fact.

-The origin of the valves: Other than King, we know that several American makers at the time ordered rotary valve sets from Europe to paste onto their existing bugles to accommodate orders for rotary horns. the question is where were these valves sourced from? Again common wisdom has seemed to indicate Cerveny, however again, I've seen a few dissenting opinions regarding this and I was hoping to sort that out.

-Elements of the design: The dimensions of this horn are quite curious to me now that I've got the chance to carefully measure it. The bell and large side of the bottom bow are consistent with the size of Mammoths from that time, but from the small side of the bottom bow onward, all of the bows are a decent bit smaller than mammoth bows, somewhere in the middle ground between the Medium (4/4) sized bows and the Mammoth (6/4) bows. This would imply that, unless there were several more of these 5/4 sized Matins that were made that we don't know about, these bows might be custom made for this horn, and if that's the case, why not just build it as a CC from the start? Its also interesting to note that the bow guards, caps, and all other trim is silver, very atypical of Matins, but it does appear to be original.

I have reached out to several previous owners of the horn, Including Mr. McAllister's daughter in order to try and sort out s much as I can about this unique instrument, and I look forward to hearing all of your thoughts and discussion. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of some of this. In the meantime, here are some photos I took of it recently to study/drool over:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing