About Johan Warburton

Welcome to the shop! I started my career in manufacturing at a very (VERY) young age, helping in my dad’s mouthpiece shop in what was then the swampland of Oviedo, FL. He taught me the basics of lathes, cartesian coordinates, and how to run the machines, at least as much as you can teach a 5 year old how to run a CNC machine!

As I became older I decided I wanted to be a musician, and earned both my undergraduate and graduate degrees in French horn performance, my Bachelor’s at Columbus State in Georgia, and my Master’s in Switzerland, at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana. At the end of my studies there, I felt the call of the artisan overtake my desire to perform, and took an apprenticeship with famed Italian instrument maker Cristian Bosc.

I worked with him for two years, learning much about what I now know of valve making and instrument building. I left my job there right before the COVID 19 pandemic, planning to shortly thereafter return to the US to work in my dad’s shop in Florida. With the pandemic and lockdown, that was put on hold, and so I took the abundant and obligatory free time to delve into CAD and CAM design from the comfort of my in-laws’ house in northern Italy. With no teacher other than YouTube and sheer stubbornness, I eventually managed to get a basic understanding of how the 3D modeling side of things worked.

In August of 2020 with the heaviest of the pandemic restrictions lifted, I returned to Florida, working there and learning everything possible about programming. In the Summer of 2024, I made the decision to move to Washington, DC to be close to my wife Giuliana, and founded my own company dedicated to providing high precision rotary valves and other components to support the growing network of small instrument makers in the US and abroad.