Hello! So, I was hoping I could find some information on one of the instruments I own. I haven't been able to find much info on it at all. I have a King Cleveland 602 Cornet. It's around 30 years old. Almost 40,now. It used to be my mother's. Any way, I was hoping I could have some history on the horn and potentially any other information.
The horn came with a Benge 7C mouth piece. After going through the archives on this site, not a single one of the Benge mouthpieces matched the kind I had. I'll get a picture of it up one of these days. If anyone has any information regarding this mouthpiece or the horn, I would be more than happy to hear about it!

Regarding Benge pieces, I've written a bit but the eBay photos go missing and I have to reupload them...

The earliest ones looked like Schmidt-made versions of the Schilke 9, some stamped Benge Chicago and others just Benge.  I have seen a version stamped Benge LA Custom as well.

Another version looks to have a standard Bach blank but with the Benge Bug/Eye logo on it, possibly a one-off.

The most common ones were made in the 1970s-2000s, starting with KMI-Benge and continuing thru UMI and Conn-Selmer*.
The earliest ones have wide, extremely italicized lettering.  These were replaced with less extreme italics but stamped deeper than before.  When UMI was formed in 1985, mouthpiece manufacturing was outsourced to Lausmann in Germany, and the Benge logo became a less-italic, shallow engraving.  Sometime around 2005 [Benge production halted 2007], the last iteration was produced, using different cup and outer blank designs [especially the cornet design], with straight lettering and separately stamped model designation.

The pieces were apparently based on Mt. Vernon Bach designs...supposedly, Claude Gordon claimed Benge purchased that tooling in the 1970s, perhaps explaining the design shifts Bach made as well as the upgrades mentioned in a 1970s catalog.  The designs later were copied by Lausmann in Germany and used on UMI, Conn, King, CKB [non-Warburton-made], Blessing [non-Warburton-made], post-1995 B&S, Faxx, Besson, and other mouthpiece brands.  Faxx in particular was "based on Mt. Vernon Bach"...wonder how?  Maybe Bach did sell its old tooling in the 1970s during upgrades...
The last Benge pieces [ca. 2005] are based on newer Bach designs; the 5B is noticeably different from the older model, for instance.

Horn of Detroit wrote on Apr 6^th, 2017 at 3:13pm: