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What does it say on the bell, below "El Dorado"?

bort wrote:What does it say on the bell, below "El Dorado"?

It says “Downs, California”

Classic B&S 101 clone. Looking closely at the pics, I believe this tuba to be an early Chinese clone of the B&S 101 ('Sonora', 'Weltklang', etc) tuba. The thumbring, ferrules, and name on the bell point to that.

If everything is in good working order and the slides and valves/S-linkage are good, these can be very good playing tubas because they are copies of the old B&S 101 design. Pretty much an older version of the Mack 200 BBb

bloke wrote:We used to have a rental tenor saxophone that was engraved “El Dorado”.
Down by the serial number was the Yanagisawa trademark (not the word, “Y....”)
We always suspected it to be a store brand.

Oh, yeah - I played one of those. I was a saxophonist in another life... and I really loved Yanagisawa saxes. I was thrilled to learn back then that Yanagisawa had made many, many stencils. For years I kept an eye out for "stealth" Yani's with names like Whitehall, Dorado (w/o El), and Astro (must have been a space-age horn). The real prize was the baritone sax they made for Vito. There were lots of those in the world then, but I bet they are showing their age now.

B&S also made saxophones back in the those days and, not surprisingly, made many stencil horns. I can't remember many of the names except Ernie Northway. That was a FINE horn!...