Miraphone question
Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2013 9:51 pm
Does anyone know when Miraphone stopped making their horns with hand-hammered bows?
Miraphone still makes some bows using the hand hammered tradition. I believe that all the bows on the new Siegfried BBb are handmade. When tooling for production bows is available, even the hand hammered ones are run through the hydraulic molds for "calibration" purposes. This guarantees that they will be the proper size, just having the thinner metal.
The process of building hand hammered bows is quite extensive and labor intensive which would really increase the costs of the instruments and severely slow down production. This is shown in the almost $6,000 price difference between the 6450 and 6450/2 Meinl Weston models.
I hope this helps.
Roger