Making your own mouthpiece

[Tubachris]

Hey!

Curious to hear if any of you have ever tried making your own or copying a mouthpiece? I saw a guy on youtube making copies of trumpet mouthpieces on a lathe and it looked really cool!

Does anyone have any experience or know how to learn more about mouthpiece making? Any books or other good sources? I really think i need to make this my new hobby!

[Mary Ann]

I think you likely have a pretty intense learning curve that will include some mathematics as well as some extremely expensive equipment. I don't know if bloke will pick up on this thread or not. Mouthpieces are not simple.

[the elephant]

Do you already own a lathe? If not, they are quite expensive for a usable one. And they have to be large to be rigid enough to cut brass rod of that diameter, so you are looking at something about six to ten feet long, weighing about 500 to 1000 pounds, requiring its own special table and (if you have pets or kids) its own dedicated room.

The first thing you need to learn is how to turn stock and square it up. Then you have all types of cuts that require you to learn how to use that specific cutting tool.

Brass rod stock is stupid expensive right now. In that diameter, the price will make your eyes water.

This is not to be done by someone who just wants to mess around. It is a financial commitment that only really works if you dedicate yourself to making LOTS of mouthpieces.

If you just want to make mouthpiece-shaped objects, you can use one of those Chinese mini lathes that are for sale under many different labels, but they will only work for something trumpet-sized (and that it pushing it) with any sort of accuracy that will net you something that works well enough to give you usable feedback. It will cost you thousands of dollars to rebuild one of these Chinese lathes so that it is even decently accurate, and you must have a high degree of accuracy to make mouthpieces.

Oh, and one other, crucial thing:

Take the price of your intended lathe and double that (at least) for the cost of all the various tooling that you *must* have to do any work. This is something that I was told repeatedly, and I poo-pooed it. "I just need to get the lathe first. Then I'll worry about tooling." Wrong! Without all the cutters and attachments, you have a large, messy, dangerous paperweight.

And a lathe can kill you or put you into the ER *very quickly if you do not practice good toolroom safety measures.

With that in mind, a cheap-ish, small-ish lathe can make adjustments to existing mouthpieces all day, if the swing is large enough for a tuba mouthpiece. Most of the Chinese lathes cannot handle something the size and shape of a tuba mouthpiece. Something like one of the old Sears-Craftsman/Atlas lathes can do this. A Southbend 9" Junior would be perfect, but they are pretty much made of unobtanium and super expensive. I have an East German laboratory lathe that is probably too small to make mouthpieces, and it weighs over a hundred pounds and takes up an entire table in my shop. An old 9" Southbend would probably weigh in at something like 450 to 500 pounds. Usually, you need a 220V line to run one. Mine was wired for the UD home market, so it uses 120V but lacks power because of this.

An old lathe can be a nightmare to locate parts for. Current production lathes that do not suck have plentiful, easy-to-purchase attachments, but they are also pretty costly.

If you were going to start from scratch, I would recommend a Precision-Matthews PM-1022V as an excellent home unit that is affordable (as far as machine tools go).

https://www.precisionmatthews.com/produ ... -pm-1030v/

I love the utility of my commie DDR lathe. It is rigid, accurate, and well-made despite its very small size (for a lathe). But it cost me a lot for something so old, and the attachments are very hard to find and very expensive.

I love my Unimat SL, too, but it is not a serious machine; but more of a super-well-made toy or for hobbyists who work on very small things, and where repeatability is not important.

Whatever you end up doing, I wish you the best of luck!

Wade

My DDR-made lathe…


PS — Modern, high-quality mini lathes are still way too small to turn the stock needed to make a tuba mouthpiece. I mean, you can do it, but you have to have a chuck large enough, and this probably will be next to impossible to find. And the modern mini lathes are just not rigid enough to do that sort of heavy cutting work. Sure, Taig and Sherline are both excellent, not at all like the cheap Sieg-made Chinese lathes. But they are not inexpensive, and the results from such lightweight machines will be something unusable and costly to make.

Small lathes are pretty dangerous when you overload them. Taig and Sherline are the best of the US-made mini lathes. Both are almost as accurate as my Präzi SD 300, and I would not trust my lathe to safely hang on to such a heavy chunk of metal at those speeds. I *would* trust that PM I linked to above. I have used one, and it is excellent, once you clean it up and do proper setup work to the bed and such. (It is not Chinese, but made in Taiwan, and of known good quality, but you still have to do a lot of work to get it ready to use. I think all lathes require a lot of cleaning and setup work to make them run accurately.

I am NOT discouraging you. I am ENCOURAGING you, but warning you of the level of commitment needed to do this work at even a very low level of experimentation.

[donn]

That looks ... too cool for me. If I had this urge, I would look into 3D printing.

[gocsick]

I have a Jet 9x20" and I wouldn't want to try a tuba mouthpiece on it. It just isn't rigid enough. I made a few grade 5 titanium rings on it one and that pushed it to the limits. I had a LeBlond 13" over center by 6' and that works have been perfect... but unfortunately I had to get rid of it due to lack of space.

The real challenge is actually making the form tools to cut the rims and cups.

[York-aholic]

That looks ... too cool for me. If I had this urge, I would look into 3D printing.

Agreed. One could 3D print until happy with the result then send the file off to a machinist to have it made in brass.

However I don’t know that the 3D printed one would play the same as the exact replica made of brass (then silver plated).

[gocsick]

Resin printing by SLA would be my choice. There are bio compatible and food safe resins for 3D printing... they are used for things like dental implants and surgical guides .. but they are spendy and the cleanup and wash procedure to remove uncured reason is very tedious because you can't use your typical solvents. I saw a Reddit post a while back that someone was making a go of printing trumpet Mouthpieces this way.

Unfortunately metal additive isn't yet an option. Laser powder bed fusion can easily print 316 stainless or grade 5 titanium with high enough dimensional accuracy... besides the cost, the surface finish is to rough so you would have to machine the rim, cup, throat, backbore, and shank anyway..

[donn]

I wouldn't need a metal additive. (One word - are you listening? Plastics.)

Mouthpieces don't resonate, it isn't like a violin soundboard or something. The rim is bound to have a different feel, though.

[BramJ]

In have printed mouthpieces using a Bambulabs A1 mini (cheaper then a lot of mouthpieces). At a small layer height and some light sanding of the rim the mouthpieces are very usable, great for experimenting.

A resin based printer is better in terms of resolution but a lot more mess and hassle to work with

[Tim Jackson]

I purchased a very nice South Bend lathe a year or so ago. It is certainly large enough to turn a tuba mouthpiece. Looks like a piece of 2-inch stock will cost around $40 for the 4 inches I need for a mouthpiece. - If I buy a 14-18 inch length for a couple of hundred dollars.

Lathes seem plentiful now, as most shops are cutting them loose. I paid $2400 for the Southbend. In parts of the country where used lathes are more abundant, prices are lower. I paid $250 to have it moved. I had friends willing to help, but we're all old, and I didn't want anyone to get hurt. The lathe and metal table was a 4-man job. I figure the weight was about the same as a grand piano.

I have experience with lathes from years ago. I worked at my brother-in-law's family factory in Selma, making wheels. The owner gave me a key so I could come in at night and run the big lathes in the front tool shop. These lathes were big enough to turn a full-size naval canon. I turned a tuba mouthpiece that summer out of aluminum - I guess that was the only piece of two-inch stock I could find. I also made several small canons with the steel stock, which was plentiful in that shop. They mostly used the lathes to make replacement parts for the giant ancient presses that stamped out wheels from sheet steel, and of course, the tool and dies for the wheel parts.

So, I'm not worried about the cost of materials, knowledge, and tools, and it is certainly something on my bucket list.

Sadly or maybe happily, at 72, I'm still too engaged in all my other endeavors to go to my shop and piddle around.

So, don't forget to add in the time factor.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

TJ

[peterbas]

.

[Charlie C Chowder]

Time! For you youngers, there seems to be lots. But at just shy of 75 and with my friends dying all around me, spending time let alone money on building mouthpieces is not for me. But I do understand as my wife sews, and it makes her happy. But I need to spend my dwindling time making music, which makes me happy.



CCC

[catgrowlB]

I think it would be really cool for someone to make metal flakes/powder-infused polycarbonate mouthpieces. Mixed with the resin during the liquid phase before hardening and curing. For better density and rigidity. I know that somewhat negates the light weight of current polycarbonate mouthpieces like the ones from Kelly. But it would still be much lighter than brass or stainless mouthpieces, yet still have the 'bulletproof' like qualities of regular lexan. Best of both worlds.

As for plated mouthpieces and tubas.....
Keep in mind that precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, palladium, etc) have been and continue to skyrocket in price. Gold is currently over a whopping $4,500 per ounce; and silver is currently around $79 per ounce.
Those prices have more than tripled over the last 5 years....
Just back in September of THIS year, silver was $42 per ounce. At the beginning of the pandemic (2020/2021) it was around $20 per ounce.

This has not happened in modern history before, certainly not in my lifetime

[donn]

If particles of a more solid nature would help, you could mix sand into the resin. That could be a cool look. With a high enough sand content, might not matter if it's polycarbonate - possibly worth a try with hardware store two part epoxy. (I would think about making the cup that way and using something else for the shank - if you could even get it to flow into the mold, sand/epoxy composite isn't going to hold up a the shank end, just guessing.)

Kelly's mouthpieces are Lexan, polycarbonate, same thing.

Apologies for crapping plastic bondo stuff on this cool thread.