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Welcome to Post-Elkhart Conn Brasswind Info! Since the Conn Loyalist does not cover information on Conn musical instruments after 1969, when C. G. Conn, Ltd. was sold to Crowell-Collier MacMillan, a publishing company, we are attempting to cover info, and we are collecting new data for an overhaul in the coming months.  After the sale, old company records were destroyed and production was relocated to plants all across the southern United States and Mexico, and the consistency and quality of the instruments declined.  This site focuses primarily on the brasswinds produced in this era.

2024 update! 
This site still gets updates?
Yes - it does now!  Thanks to a few friends of the site and brasswind manufacturing design, engineering, and history, we have a few thousand scans of Conn engineering specification sheets, scanned from original vellum that thankfully was saved in a corner pile at the Eastlake factory.  While it sadly has many gaps, this revealed some interesting insights into the designs of Conn brasswinds.

For instance, the short-lived 25A & 25B Director cornet & trumpet.  These seemed to be stopgaps to fill orders and perhaps train assemblers early in the Abilene period, from 1972-1974.  The 25A is distinctive in that it combines a 19A receiver with a small-bore leadpipe and tuning slide, 77B valve block, and a bell with the USA Shooting Stars stamp.  Not many exist, and they seem to turn up in Texas a fair amount.  The 25B is even less common, as it basically is a 77B Connquest with a Director receiver stamp.  The 25B number was used for different models previously, but it may have been inherited from the 25A nomenclature.  So where did 25A come from?  Perhaps it was just an incrementation up from 24A, the Swiss Willson flugelhorn stencil...and UMI dug that idea up again for the 25F flugelhorn, a King 650 Diplomat stencil.

Check out the whole collection here on Google Drive!

Another interesting one - the Conn 16A seemed to originate during the Elkhart period...
This infamous model, taking cues from a 1910s Holton New Proportion and 1950s Besson London 10-10, first came about as the Yamaha-built 19A and 21A Coprion in 1971.  By 1974, the US-made version with barrel-cased springs and a new bell stamp had arrived.  But the distinctive "underslung" tuning slide was already around in 1969:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1frwOb0nzYQL41YX6-ulW-r7cNAJj_fzU/view - even without the model number, the "first used on A [cornet indication letter]" and 0.453" bore nail this as a cornet design.  

Spec sheets bearing other names explicitly list the 16A and 16B [some drawn by Bob Ziems in particular] - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BvFxOgokWUtOJulTLrEGQD3NAyefVyOR & https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10ph8sNQ2U9bNNSirNhC-c2JjLYnXP4ef - so it looks like the plans on upgrading the older Director series were put on hold, transferred to Yamaha OEM models, transferred back to Connquest-based platform, then reinstated by 1974.  This also explains the incrementation leading to the various model numbers used and reused.

Note that this site is not intended to imitate the Conn Loyalist or other "___ Loyalist" sites.

THIS SITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION - RECENTLY MIGRATED.