Sorry I didn't get around to finishing my reply to this thread yesterday, but stuff happened. In any event, here are my thoughts about this this interesting sax....
Given I've literally been collecting research and images about Hammerschmidt saxophones for years, I was extremely surprised when I opened the email yesterday from NH Sax yesterday, to find myself looking at what clearly a stencil of a Klingsor tenor.
Hammerschmidt did make some stencils, but unlike their contemporaries like Keilwerth and Dörfla & Jörka, they made very few. With the Admiral brand, this brings the stencil names that I have seen to a total of 9. The others are: DABICO, Genton, Hüttl, LE MEILLEUR DU MONDE, Lipson, Silvertone, Velvetone, and of course Lafleur and Lafleur De Luxe that the company stencilled horns for for the British and Japanese markets.
It's easy to ID this Admiral as a Hammerschmidt despite its unconventional key guards. The octave mechanism; dual octave vents on the body; left thumb rest & octave lever; shape of the left & right palm keys; engraving (Hammerschmidt used that s
ame floral engraving on some of its Klingsor horns); shape of the left pinkie cluster; as well as the shape of the right pinkie keys, all make this a clear Hammerschmidt stencil horn.
As far as the quasi eyebrow-style key guards are concerned, Hammerschmidt did make those as well. I have documented some of those over the years, but two recently popped up on eBay that
I wrote about on the blog portion of my website. One is perhaps the prettiest sax I have seen in years.
If anyone is interested in reading more about the Hammerschmidt company, you can find info on them
on my website. I realize that I should update that page soon. Like a number of the pages on my site, it has been a number of years since I wrote it, and I have new info and images to illustrate the page with. Nonetheless, the page contains no errors that I know of, and offers readers a good overview of the company's history in the saxophone world.
For those of you interested in all things Hammerschmidt, I do also have a
series of articles on the blog portion of my website about the company. It's an easy way to find all the articles I have written about them related to saxophones. Some are more interesting than others, but for those of you looking for info on all things Hammerschmidt, you'll find some gems there.
And lastly, I also have an a fairly extensive
Hammerschmidt gallery on Bassic Sax Pix. (817 images at the time of writing.) There you can see the horns with the various types of key guards--although I have not updated it with the latest eBay offerings that I wrote about on my blog a few weeks ago--as well as the stencils I've stumbled across during the last decade or so of German saxophone research.