A Vintage Mouthpiece Resuscitation

I sometimes buy ugly mouthpieces off of Ebay.  Ugly mouthpieces, if the seller includes good pictures, sell inexpensively and I don't really care if the tip is chipped or there are scratches in the chamber from using a brush or something that causes this:

I don't know what caused this, but it looks like this  mouthpiece was repeatedly cleaned with a nail.  I had never seen a chamber that was so torn up.

This mouthpiece was obviously attacked with really course sandpaper.

Or maybe it was dragged across a cement sidewalk in an attempt to alter the facing curve.

Beginning at the ligature line, a "new" facing curve was rasped on to this Riffault alto mouthpiece.  Here is a close up of the "workmanship."

The table was also violated, and the artisan's spasmodic alteration continues on to the mouthpiece shank.

I suspect that it was not a person who modified this, but rather, a chimpanzee.  None of the pictures on Ebay showed this damage when I purchased it.  It was simply a vintage hard rubber alto mouthpiece with a nice brass cap and ligature.  I recognized it as a Riffault and spent $25.  

Be careful when buying an old vintage mouthpiece as a "carcass" to work on.  $25 is okay with a nice ligature and cap.  That way, after you put a new lay on the piece, you know that you have a ligature that fits and a cap that protects your new work.  

Keeping a cap on a vintage hard rubber piece is very important.  Little nicks and dents to the rails and tip will effect how it plays.  It also protects it from ultraviolet damage.  You can polish off discolored areas with some difficulty.  A brown residue will be left on your polishing cloth.  Undamaged (black) ebonite will not leave a residue.  This should tell us something.  Brown discolored ebonite is softer than undamaged ebonite.  You might not see sun damage on the rails and tip, but it's there, possibly making the area softer.  Keep a cap on it as discussed in this blog.

When shopping for a carcass, don't buy something like this!!!  

Yes, Dau-Han bought generic mouthpieces like this one from Riffault.  Yes, they are not common (I think that they may have been a small Eastern European distributor).  This is not a Dau-Han mouthpiece.  Dau-Han stamped their logo on the mouthpieces that they distributed.  This is the exact same mouthpiece as my $25 Riffault.  Don't pay $300 too much, plus $3 too much on shipping.

Back to my $25 Riffault mouthpiece.  The damage to the shank will be hard to correct, but the rest of it doesn't matter that much, as I was intending to reface it anyway.  The goofy table and lay will make that a little more difficult at the beginning.

How goofy is the table and lay?  First, I slide my .0015 inch feeler gauge under the mouthpiece while it is face down on my granite bench top.  That tells me instantly the approximate length of the lay and whether it is straight.  This should be good.

Eu tenho um pepino no banco de trabalho!  That's a crooked facing.

As you would expect from the pictures, it is a mess.  I've never seen a mouthpiece this bad before.  Here goes.

First I need to flatten the table.  Because it is such a mess, I'm going to start with aggressive 220 sandpaper.

I used the outside calipers to measure the thickness at the back edge of the table and the thickness of the beak.  It's not really necessary, but just gives me some figures to work with.  As we have already seen from picture #4, the prior owner has ground down the back of the table near the shank just about as far as possible.  Still, it is possible to flatten the table.

Here is the table cleaned up and flattened, but look at the "take off point" for the lay curvature!  A normal take off point is much further towards the tip, about 1/3 down the window opening.

Getting the table flat is not enough.  I'm going to have to work the table flat and make a decent "take off point" for my lay.  That means the table has to be flat past the window opening (about 1/3 of the window length).  That is doable, but when I flattened the table, I ended up with a tip opening of approximately 1.20 mm or .047 inch.  That's the smallest Riffault made for alto (Riffault tip openings are shown in this blog).  This piece started out as a Riffault 3 (1.45 mm) before the horrendous modification.  I'm forced to start by going backwards.

Once the table is flat and long enough, I have to start thinking about the tip.  But not the entire tip.  Before I open the tip back up to something that is usable, this is a good time to clean up the baffle and chamber.  It is a disaster.  As are the side rails.  Now is the time to clean up the inside and then I can put the lay on and not have to mess with the interior very much. 

Here is a purpose made "specialty tool" for cleaning up all of the gouges on the inside.  It is a thin strip of waterproof emery paper glued on to an old reed that was split into thirds (old cane reeds are wonderful to have on the workbench.  Since I now use synthetic reeds, I'm using up my old cane reeds as sanding tools and glue applicators).  

I use plenty of water so that the paper doesn't load up with dust.  Repeated rinsing of the sanding tool tends to loosen the contact cement that I used, but I can generally get by with two of these tool per mouthpiece chamber work.  The first one (shown here) is 320 grit and the second finishing tool will be 600 grit.  The paper extends past the sides of the split reed, and that allows me to finish the chamber right up to the side rails.

Here it is with the big gouges polished out of the chamber and the rails cleaned and straightened a little.  I still haven't really done anything to the mangled tip rail.

You may have seen this aspect of mouthpiece refacing in my other blogs (which also show how to measure your progress).  What looks like a contour line inside is simply where I used my finger to clear some dust out of the chamber and get this picture of the tip rail.  Nothing has been done inside yet other than cleaning up the big scratches.  I'm putting on a curve from a vintage Meyer 6.

Now that I am closer to getting the curve that I want, I can go back and do a preliminary finish on the baffle and tip rail.  Here, I'm keeping the baffle higher than on a vintage Meyer.

Still working on the lay, I usually have to go back and forth a few times between getting the right lay and reworking the tip rail and baffle.  Here, the tip rail is thinner, but I know that I'm still a little bit shy of putting on the final curvature and tip opening.

A little more finish work on the lay and the tip rail ends up a little wider again and needs some touch up.  But I now have the lay that I want and the micro thin tip rail (below) common to vintage Meyers.

Finally, things line up and everything gets polished.  There are still a few residual gouges from whatever was done to the inside of the piece (a faint white line on the right hand side), but I'm not going to worry about internal cosmetics too much.  A $25 mouthpiece, two hours of labor, and NOW it's worth $1,325.  Unfortunately, even cleaned up and playing wonderfully, it's probably only worth $60 on the open market, unless somebody gets a chance to play it first.  That's generally how I sell my pieces.  Other players try them.

If you want to try playing something like a vintage Selmer Air-Flow* or Rico Gregory, here is your chance at 1/10th the cost.  This Riffault now has more baffle than most vintage pieces but, if I reduced it, there is no going back (other than sticking goop on the inside to create a baffle).  I hate sticking epoxy and stuff inside to make a baffle.  All you are doing is putting a baffle in a piece that has a lay that you like.  Buy a piece with a baffle and put the same lay on it!  There is never a reason to have a baffle booger stuck inside of your mouthpiece!!

I have some other blogs on facing junker mouthpieces.  It is surprising how often I find that they are junkers only because of bad facings.  Even a plastic Selmer Goldentone can make an interesting piece when it has a new facing. 



*  I'm referring to an actual Selmer Air-Flow, not the ones often misrepresented as Selmer Air-Flows on the internet.  Selmer Air-Flows are actually easy to identify.  They are stamped "Air-Flow."  How convenient, right?  But sellers often claim that models prior to and after the Air-Flow model are also Air-Flows.  Here is the model that preceded the Air-Flow.  I don't think that Selmer gave it a name, but it has a wire-banded shank.  Maybe a Selmer Wire-Band?

This is one of the "later" Wire-Band models.  A tenor.

Here is an older one with a really generic Selmer stamp.  By "old," we are talking 1920's and earlier.

These had giant chambers similar to the largest offered on the Rico Gregory Model A.  The baffle work looks suspiciously modern on this piece, but the lay designation on the table is still present, so I don't know if it is original.  The lay on a real Air-Flow was not indicated on the table.

An actual Selmer Air-Flow.

The  Air-Flow did not have the lay and chamber information on the table.  It has a serial number on the side.  It also has an M20 facing.  These are kind of rare and I don't know if anybody has taken the time to try to determine how that designation compares to the similar Rico Gregory mouthpieces.  Did Selmer offer chamber sizes on the  Air-Flow?

How do we know that the above mouthpiece is a real Selmer Air-Flow?  Because it says so.  Some of the mouthpiece websites discuss the Selmer Air-Flow while showing pictures of the earlier Wire-Band and the later Scroll-Shank, neither of which are correct.  The Scroll-Shank does have a similar chamber (smaller than the older Wire-Band) but it is obviously from a different mold and therefore unlikely to have the same chamber plug.  The two models share a round or "peashooter" rear chamber, as do many mouthpieces, including the Rico Gregory.  In fact, the Air-Flow disappeared just at the time the strikingly similar Rico Gregory appeared.  That is really interesting considering the early 1930's business relationship between Selmer and Roy Maier (later of Rico Products).

Above is the later "not an Air-Flow".  Since it doesn't say Air-Flow anywhere on it, I'm going to call it a Scroll-Shank and leave the model name Air-Flow to those mouthpieces that Selmer designated as Air-Flow.