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Hey Guys,

I just found an eBay listing showing an Imperial 3 valve tuba with a serial number of 141,238 yet all the lists I've seen say Boosey & Hawks Ltd. start around 145,000.

Check it out at
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0796899848" target="_blank

Which list are you referencing?
Was it this one?
http://www.horniman.ac.uk/media/_file/b ... ts_web.pdf" target="_blank" target="_blank
This list places its production date as 1932/1933

Take a look at this web page: http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/am/gdsj.html

In 1874, Boosey & Co. abandoned the Distin name and merged the serial number sequences. The new combined sequence begins at 14345 and therefore overlaps the earlier sequence for brass instruments other than cornets. However, individual instruments can be linked to one or other sequence based on whether they carry the name of Distin & Co. or Boosey & Co. In 1930, Boosey & Co. merged with Hawkes & Son to form Boosey & Hawkes. The new company continued Boosey’s serial number sequence, and the Boosey & Co. stamp also continued to appear on instruments up until early 1932. As with the later Distin numbers, the dates given here are the dates the instruments were ordered and their actual production may have taken place sometime after the date given.

I haven't done much research on this so this is purely speculative. The way I understand it, these lists are compiled through remaining documentation from the factories, sales invoices, and any proof that ties the horn with a given time. They are not complete. I would imagine it might have been possible for a horn to take longer than expected to be completed. I would also imagine that during the early years of the great depression, demand for tubas was probably quite low. So maybe it is possible that this horn was assigned a serial number when horns where stamped Boosey and Co but completed under the Boosey and Hawkes brand.

I'm looking at both the lists from hotn-u-copia and the Instrument trader.

Looking at the page referenced above. It shows that an 4 valve piston F tuba with the serial number 141,153 was made in July of 1932 and sold for $11.

This means that the horn trader and horn-u-copia lists are off by about 4000 and 3 years.

Gilligan wrote:Hey Guys,

I just found an eBay listing showing an Imperial 3 valve tuba with a serial number of 141,238 yet all the lists I've seen say Boosey & Hawks Ltd. start around 145,000.

Big whoop. The fact that the lists start around 145,000 doesn't make them wrong: it simply makes them incomplete.

I have one here which has the serial no 109712 on the valve block. Interestingly, the bell has 139356. Pretty sure it was built from parts of two seperate high pitch instruments being "converted" to low pitch - probably in the 70s. Some shops weren't too careful about keeping things together when doing a full brass band's instruments in one lot. I suspect I could find another one with the bell and valve block numbers reversed in the store room of the band which owns this one.