Taking advantage of the holiday day (25 of April) and Claudio's kindness we had a complete factory tour with enough time to document the various steps of the saxophone assembly process. Unfortunately the camera battery was gone and I was not clever enough to bring with me a reserve... so what you see are only pictures with short descriptions and personal considerations.
Inside the Factory
At the end of the visit I had the opportunity to test some instruments among them a very good burnished gold alto; here you can find a movie in which I tried to save at least the audio quality in spite of the video one. The file size is almost 30Mb so be patient with this download… other movies are available at the ond of the sections regarding the half-curved soprano and the alessofono. Obviously since there were no better players I played these instruments so try with your fantasy to imagine their sound when played by true saxophone players J. One example can be found both on the R&C web site and on the web site of one of the most important Rampone endorser: Emanuele Cisi, you can find his web site here: http://www.emanuelecisi.com/ . It will be very useful toh ave a more precise idea of the Ramponi sound. I am grateful to Emanuele for his kindles. Enjoy hearing those files.
The Factory is divided in various parts, here we are in the part where among other things the keys are assembled on the saxophone body
The bells also are first handmade hammered and after that refined using the same technique thus allowing a very smooth surface with no imperfections, ready to be used in the next steps of the building procedure.
Here you can observe the bell in its definitive shape. In the Rampone saxophones inside the rolled part of the bell is always present a brass ring which contribute to recreate the famous warm and deep tone of these saxophones
Everything starts from brass plates accurately cutted to obtain through a first soldering process the rough parts constituting the saxophones
The shafts are first handmade hammered and after that refined through a simple and ingenious procedure “in loco” developed but hard to explain here… the tone holes are extruded by using a properly designed “corkscrew” partially visible in the first picture (in the upper right corner). The different shapes of the instruments doesn’t allow positioning errors and parts inversion. In the photo on the right is reported the entire series of semi-spherical shape extruders. During the entire saxophone building process a dent at the end of the conical bore gives the reference for its exact positioning.
Shafts and bells ready to be used in the other steps of the assembling process
Any single key is handmade soldering once at time the single elements who make the entire part, any key has a different soldering base as the one reported in the photo on the left upper side.
The machines for the burnishing process, the cleaning and lacquering process give the final product as those wonderful exemplars of curved and half-curved R1 and R1 Jazz sopranos, it is easy to be in love with them
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