I'm just going to place this right here...

[Donn]

Any made of iron? Lots of iron ore in Michigan.

[edsel585960]

Iron would be good. Could double as a battering ram.

[Donn]

Well, maybe. I'm not up on metallurgy in general, but seems likely enough that if iron is less ductile or something, that might end up requiring thicker walls and hence more battering ram potential. Generally it's inferior to bronze for most purposes.

But jokes aside ... or maybe not ... it seems to me I've read the proposition somewhere that the mystic properties of York's brass might have had something to do with iron in the local alloys, thanks to Michigan's geology. OK, joke's still on, I'm sure, but there you go. "Bronze" means a wide range of things, including brass ("commercial bronze" = 9:1 Cu:Zn); "aluminum bronze" could have iron in it too, but no tin. My trombone has a bell that's ostensibly bronze but practically all copper. In this case "bronze" means "it suits our purposes to imply that it's bronze."

[iiipopes]

One of the popular (although we all know it is technically much more complex) definitions of bronze, as opposed to brass, is that bronze is mostly copper & some tin, and brass is mostly copper and some zinc, in whatever proportion suits the application.

I agree that to call "Michigan York" metal bronze is a misnomer, since there is traditionally very little tin in musical instrument metal, although again, depending on the source of the ore (or scrap metal) and the balance of the "impurities," (other elements in the ore) it could be just about anything.

Here is the biggest misnomer of all: acoustic guitar strings. The wrap wire on the most popular lines of acoustic guitar strings is advertised as 80/20 copper/zinc, what is essentially between what we call regular "yellow" brass and "gold brass" (although closer to many manufacturer's "gold brass" alloy) for brass instruments. Yet, the acoustic guitar string manufacturers market this alloy of guitar strings as "bright bronze," to distinguish it from their other alloys, such as phosphor bronze, which actually does have a percentage point or so of phosphor along with tin, but no zinc, so it is an actual bronze alloy.

[iiipopes]

Kanstul has recreated York brass. We all needn't worry about what the old stuff was made of.

Well, yes and no. When it comes to the spectro-analysis to get the actual amount of any particular metal or other elements (like carbon, silicon, etc., in addition to the other "impurities" often found in ore used to make brass, like iron, lead, cadmium, selenium, etc.) in the alloy, I'm sure it is close. Does that automatically make a horn have the "York" sound? No. Let's see: the particular alloy of that particular horn that was analyzed compared to horns made at other times from different shipments of raw metal, the design specs of the horn, including bore, taper, throat and bell flare, how it was shaped around the mandrels, how the pieces were put together, including the solder and flux used, how the metal was tempered to any particular hardness or softness, how it was buffed to final thickness of the metal, if anything was "forced" into place that might alter the resonance or the nodes & antinodes, etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum. The sum will always be greater than any of the parts.

[alfredr]

I couldn't help noticing that early bronze often had arsenic in it. If the Chinese ever give up on trying to poison us by using lead in everything, they could try this.

[windshieldbug]

It was that plastic bronze. Just before they added the flamethrowers.