Removing a tooth gouge from a hard rubber mouthpiece

Just a short blog on tooth gouges.  They are quite common on older student pieces.  Children, like kittens, have sharp teeth.  Sometimes it ruins the piece.  More often, it just looks bad.  If the mouthpiece is a good vintage blank, and many of them are, we need to get rid of the gouges as part of the refacing project.

Here is a fairly common vintage mouthpiece that is often sold on Ebay as a "Meyer blank."  It isn't, but making that claim drives the prices up.  Not that this is a bad blank, but it only looks identical to a Meyer on the exterior.  The chamber is slightly different.  Maybe better?  Don't tell a Meyer fan that.

It cost me $13.  Anyway . . .

You can see the teeth marks left by the young weasel, I mean, student.  Below is a better look once I have roughed up the beak with a file.

There are a couple of things to watch for in this process.  First, make sure that you have enough thickness to work with.  I could tell from the first picture (and the picture on Ebay), that the gouge was cosmetic.  It is possible to measure the beak thickness at the gouge with an outside caliper if you are in doubt.  Just put one leg tip in the hole and the other inside the chamber.  Chances are you will have more than 2 mm, which is plenty of thickness to rework the beak.

The second thing to watch for is the thickness of the tip right at the tip rail.  I intend to open up the tip a little as part of the refacing and I will need that thickness.  So what I am doing is making a little bit of a "duck bill" shape to the beak.  If I use a flat file, it will likely reduce the tip thickness.  I have to use a half-round file and make sure to stop my strokes before I get to the tip.  I won't end up with a uniform slope, like a door stop, but it doesn't matter.  Some vintage pieces have a scoop shaped beak and it doesn't matter.  In fact, it can be an improvement.

You can see my half-round file (actually, a rasp) with ebonite in the teeth.  The depth of the rasp scratches are about the same as the remaining tooth marks, so it's time to switch to a finer file.  As I remove the rasp marks, I will take it down to the depth of the gouge, and that is all I need.  I don't need to rasp until the tooth gouge is completely gone and then change to less aggressive filing.

I have now moved to 400 grit paper.  If you look closely (click on the picture), you can still see a tiny spot remaining from the deeper of the two gouges.  That will disappear when I move on to 600 and 1500 grit paper.  Then it is polished and the beak is as good as new.  Maybe even better.

Besides cosmetics, there is another good reason to remove tooth gouges.  The depth of the gouge shown in the original picture tells us where the prior owner was "locked in" to a playing position.  That isn't likely to be the position that we want to be "locked into."  In fact, the original player probably didn't want to be locked in to that position.  If the player decided to take in more or less mouthpiece, either because of improving his embouchure or just temporarily for a certain sound, he will find that the gouges will take him back to the original position.

Getting rid of gouges can be more than cosmetic.