Over the past several months I have had the privilege to tackle a new and unique challenge – the repair and restoration of a vintage wooden ocarina! This instrument was sent to me by a fellow ocarinist in the community, who reached out after unsuccessfully finding an instrument repair shop who would take on this job. The ocarina was a beautiful little vintage Alan Albright alto C/F harmony wooden ocarina. The ocarina was originally acquired from a second-hand antiques shop. The owner had it for about a year before it unfortunately developed a large split on the larger, lower C chamber, separating along the glue line to create a large 1mm warped gap that rendered the ocarina unable to play. After an initial assessment, I came up with a unique proposal inspired by shakuhachi repair – by leveraging a controlled super-humidification process, I would carefully close the gap by allowing the wood to naturally return to its original state, and complete the final gluing and stabilization after the crack was brought to a hairline width. Over the course of several weeks, I slowly ramped up and stabilized the ocarina in a sterile, high humidity environment. The, after performing the repair, I carefully ramped humidity back down, and allowed the ocarina to restabilize at standard humidity levels. By leveragfing this controlled process, along with stabilizing clamps, I could seamlessly close the gap in the most non-intrusive method possible, keeping the ocarina in its original form, while also retraining the wood to stabilize out the resodual stresses from the intiial warping. After completion of the crack repair, I did a fine resanding of the instrument, followed with a refinishing of the instrument with 10 coats of pure, naturally cut tung oil as originally intended by Alan Albright himself, and performed a final cleaning of the windway to remove built up gunk from decades of use, which was contributing to poor tone and response of the larger C chamber. In addition, I removed scratch marks from the mouthpiece.
As a result of this effort, I have decided to further expand my offerings to the ocarina community, and off the first ever dedicated wooden ocarina repair and restoration services, opening the doors of my workshop to help any wooden ocarina from any maker, restoring them to their former glory. Details about the official repair and restoration services at Bretti Musical Instruments can be found in the dedicated page below:
Wooden Ocarina Repair and Restoration Services – Bretti Musical Instruments
Full in-depth details about this repair and restoration job can be seen in the YouTube video below:
Repair and Restoration of a Vintage Albright Wooden Harmony Ocarina
