Dealing with Atkinson Brass by Email, Email #1

What follows is the first of my emails with Mark Atkinson where I express disappointment about the repairs done to my horn. Two edits have been made: I deleted both email addresses and in line two of my email, I changed my wife's name to "My wife."

From Atkinson (in reply):

Hi Chris,

Thank you for your email. You are of course indeed correct. The water keys
were not put on and
evidently our worker forgot this and I unfortunately missed this. My
apologies.
We can issue a check for the amount that we owe you. According to our
records you wanted on water key on the mouthpipe and one water key on the
3rd Bb slide. Total $135.00. Please reconfirm your mailing address.
I believe this is the first time that this has happened in 35 years and I
am very
dismayed at the worker for overlooking this.
Please let me know your thoughts and again my apologies for this
inconvenience.

Sincerely, Mark


> Date: 6/27/2005 6:42:22 AM
> Subject: RE: knopf double
>
>
> Dear Mark,
>
> This is Chris, I recently had an old Knopf in for valve job and bell cut.
> My wife just brought the horn this evening back to Japan this evening. At
that
> time I had also wanted to have water keys put on the horn which I paid
for
> but they didn't get installed. I had asked for 3. One on each main tuning
> slide and one on the 3rd Bb valve slide. I also noticed that not all the
> corks as well as the vavle springs for the main valves weren't replaced.
> Anyways, the cut bell and the new slide sections look nice.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Chris
>

Atkinson Brass Invoices for French Horn Repair Services

So I guess before, I start a website, slamming a company like Atkinson for incompetent repairs on my horn and overall customer dissatisfaction, I should at least prove that I did partake of their services. Here are both the invoices. The first invoice, is related to the valve re-plating. The second is in relation to having the bell cut which I called in while they had the horn the first time. Note, I blacked out my shipping information. I also apologize for the poor quality of the scans. This weekend, I'll dig the invoices out again and rescan them.

The first invoice:




Here is the second invoice for having the bell cut:

Atkinson Brass Sucks

Ok this first post on Atkinson Brass French Horns Suck Blog is the proverbial hello world post. Basically, I sent a very old HF Knopf that I had been using for years to Atkinson's repair shop in Burbank, California. Their website waxed poetic about their love of old horns and I had had terrible luck with repair shops in the area where I was living and so I sent my horn. Their first attempt to do what I wanted with my horn ended up botched horribly. Their second attempt was only slightly better than the first. This blog stands as a warning to anyone, Don't send or buy a horn from Atkinson Brass until you've read all of the information on this site and have decided that you like to take risks about the quality you'll receive. BTW I would be happy to talk about my experience with anyone so give me an email at osakochris [at] hotmail [dot] com with out all the spaces and brackets.