Oh no, I dropped my saxophone mouthpiece!

It happens to everybody sooner or later.  I put two mouthpieces in my shirt pocket, one with a cap and one without.  Then I picked up a box.  It didn't happen because I leaned over.  I know that one.  It happened because as I lifted the box up against my chest, it pushed a mouthpiece up and out of my pocket.

Guess which one fell out?  The one with the protective cap?  No, of course not.  I heard the distinctive sound of a nice hard rubber mouthpiece clattering across the floor.  This blog is just to show you what can happen.  It didn't shatter or break.  In fact, at first I thought that everything was okay.  I get a lot of mouthpieces in that look "good" that really aren't.  They have been dropped, or knocked around in a case with other items and the lay and tips may look okay to the naked eye, but under magnification there are issues.

If you have read anything about mouthpiece facings, you know that the lay is generally fabricated by measuring in thousandths of an inch.   My bouncing mouthpiece messed things up by more than a thousandth of an inch.

You can see that the tip has been pushed in on the left hand side.  It has raised the tip edge up to the point where it won't seal correctly on that side.  There is also the same issue on the other side.  It looks like, as it bounced on the floor, it came down a few times on the tip.

In fact, it appears to have bounced three times on the tip in order to get these deformations.  Left, right, and center right.  Another possibility is that it already had one or more of these issues prior to falling out of my pocket.  That is why you need to put a mouthpiece cap on even when the mouthpiece is safely in your case.

But wait!  There's more.  Hard rubber can dent and fracture.  It has a crystalline structure that is soft enough to be dented (like the embossed name on some hard rubber mouthpieces), but if given a hard whack it can also shatter.  Just above the deformation on the left tip rail shown above is a light spot.  I could see under magnification that this spot is a "chip" of missing material.  The way that it was struck on the edge removed some material, much like "pressure flaking" to make an obsidian arrowhead.

While all of this looks bad, its actually very, very common to find mouthpieces in a similar condition, often with the player never realizing that the tip is damaged.  Here is a picture that a friend sent me, asking if this was a manufacturing characteristic of this mouthpiece.

Nope.  It's just a vintage mouthpiece that has lived a long and active life.  

The deformation ridges can be pressed back in to place by rubbing the piece on a glass surface.  It is similar to putting a lay on the piece, but without using any sandpaper.  If the distortion is serious (and mine is), then I would probably use 1500 sanding paper and carefully remove them and rework the tip rail. 

Or, now is a good time to bump up the tip opening a step (or a half step or quarter step).  This is the mouthpiece that I was working on in another blog (making a Selmer Airflow from a vintage blank), so I will just rework the entire lay.  But when I say "quarter step," I mean that there is nothing special about the common mouthpiece tip opening numbers (5*, 6, 6*) claimed to be in .005 inch increments (.085, .090, .095).  A .091" tip opening plays just fine if it fits the lay curvature.  Believe me, you won't be able to tell the difference.  It requires the same amount of work (or maybe more) to change from .090 to .091 as it does to change to .095.  But if you are thrilled with the piece and just want to clean up the minute damage, a .091 tip opening won't cause the sky to fall.