A large share of vintage student brass carries a name that appears in no maker’s main catalog: Pan American, Cavalier, Bundy, Cleveland, Ambassador. These are stencil brands — instruments built by a major factory and badged for a distributor, a school market or a price point. Knowing which factory stood behind the name is the whole game of dating them.
Pan American and Cavalier — Conn
Pan American was Conn’s own second brand, built in Elkhart from 1917 with its own serial sequence — the archive keeps it as a separate series so a Pan American number never gets read as a Conn one. Cavalier, another Conn-built badge, runs on a prefix line of its own; the published table for it is thin, and the archive marks it as such rather than guessing.
Bundy — Selmer USA, built by Buescher
Bundy was Selmer USA’s student line from the early 1960s. From 1963 the brass was actually produced by Buescher in Elkhart — so a brass Bundy is dated with the Buescher table. The archive handles this as a redirect: look up a Bundy number and it offers to run the same number through Buescher’s records.
Cleveland — the student King
Cleveland was the student line of King (H.N. White). Its numbering runs 1925–1975 in broad five-year milestones, so answers are ranges by nature — the archive presents them that way.
Why this matters before you buy
Stencil instruments range from excellent professional horns (Pan American’s better lines) to pure school-band workhorses — and their prices follow the builder, not the badge. A Bundy with a Buescher Aristocrat-era number can be a sleeper; a badged name nobody can place may still date cleanly once you know the parent. The brand directory lists each of these names with the tables that actually apply.