Helen, I actually just took the horn into the shop today and spoke to the tech at length about it. It's her opinion that the neck is flawed-the shape is a bit odd, and she thinks the cone is likely off as well. She noted the odd pip, but she's loathe to do a lot to the horn that's permanent without knowing if it will really fix the intonation. I'll try getting some blue painter's tape and try putting it inside the tenon end, but I'm likely not going to do much else with the horn since I'm not gigging with it. I was really hoping someone was going to say they had tried necks and that a certain make worked well as a replacement. But the custom necks systems that cost $1000 are beyond what I'm willing to spend.
Since I have not seen or played your horn, I can't tell you if it suffers from exactly the same problem as mine. In my case the neck appears fine, as does the horn. The two unfortunately do just not play "nice" together.
After soaking over 2 hours of shop time into it with my tech, I reached out to Uwe Ladwig from Germany. He is a tech, saxophone historian, author, and pro player. I knew he had restored Hammerschmidt saxophones in the past. He is the one who told me about the neck issues, and advised me that there really no fixing it if I got a bad one. His suggestion was to look for another Klingsor neck that might, and he stressed
might, be fine. The other option was to hang the horn on the wall and call it art.
Quite frankly, I was disappointed to say the least. I didn't understand how this could have happened, and how come no one had written about this anywhere, warning potential buyers that this could be a problem. (It turns out they had, only it was in a German music journal.) After doing my homework, I decided to write the article that I did for my web site's blog so that English-speaking/reading players would have the same info as German players.
This article does not sit well with potential sellers of Hammerschmidts, but I didn't write it for them. I wrote it so that potential buyers will know to ask the questions that I didn't know to ask.
The fact is, no matter how much saxophone knowledge you have, or how long you've been playing, unless you play-test a saxophone personally, the possibility always exists that you will end up with a dud. It's happened to me on 2 occasions, and on both of them, I bought from players who were supposed to know their stuff.