Manufacturing History of Vincent Bach Mouthpieces
While there is little known history of Vincent Bach’s mouthpiece manufacturing, there are examples of old tooling and historical reports of Vincent’s manufacturing process. Below are a few examples that are still known to exist.
More recent examples of modern Elkhart manufacturing can be found in videos and various photographs from the current manufacturing facility.
- Mouthpiece Backbore Reamer Tool (1930s)
” The first lathe shapes the exterior of the mouthpiece, cuts it to the right length and feeds itself. Another lathe is used to drill and shape the inside, turning out a unit everything minute and each exactly the measurements designed by Vincent Bach. “
- Mouthpiece Master Model for Cup (1935)
This extremely rare Vincent Bach Corporation mouthpiece was the master or model for the “cup tool” dated December 10, 1935. This was how Vincent maintained relative sizes, keeping them consistent through tooling wear over the years. Other examples exist in the Conn-Selmer Vincent Bach collection, located in Elkhart, IN.
This mouthpiece also confirms the mouthpiece lettering font and the size stamp that was being used in December 1935.
– Special thanks to Jared Ragsdale for sharing this example to the BachLoyalist collection.
source: from the Bach Loyalist collection. Special thanks to Jared Ragsdale.
source: Musical Merchandise, November 1926 source: BachFEST 2018, Elkhart, IN, June 2018
There are limited photos of manufacturing inside the Mt. Vernon factory. These photos are from January 17, 1956. On the left, a Brown & Sharpe automatic screw machine for cutting mouthpiece cups and backbores.
As shared on this page, Vincent Bach Stories – Fact or Fiction.
” There is a story that Vincent Bach, later in the Mt. Vernon era, had too much waste, so he had blanks made by Miller Automatics in Brooklyn, New York.”
This is still unconfirmed, but we would like to answer his question with documentation or other firsthand experiences.
During BachFEST held in June 2018 at the Elkhart factory, during the factory tool, the plant team showed how they buffed the final CNC-machined mouthpieces prior to the Silver electroplating process.
