Mouthpiece adapter fitting

[MiBrassFS]

In fiddling with this Willson 4 valve non—comp euph I have here (according to a bit of research, I’m thinking it might be pre-2704 or ”other” because of the very large bell it sports), I have found it has a large euph shank or a too small (“unreamed…”) bass shank mouthpiece receiver. Euph shank mouthpieces work best (seating deeply). Those “tenor to euph” adapters seat too deeply to work and just rattle in the receiver. So, in the spirit of “what if,” I found an old Bach “tenor to BASS” trombone shank adapter in my junk and decided to turn it down to fit this receiver.

It turned out pretty well. (Years ago I was able to watch an old school mouthpiece maker hand make and adjust mouthpieces. While I wish I had learned more and had some real “hands on,” what I did learn has come in handy over the years.) I took the shank down, fitted it to the receiver and, then hand finished it.

It will give some “tenor” options, but I think I may ream the receiver to bass size. I believe there’s enough stock there to do this. I don’t think it will take much. Until then, I have this custom adapter to… fiddle with.

Clipboard Nov 29, 2024 at 8.26 AM.jpeg (63.23 KiB) Viewed 98 times

[York-aholic]

I’m sorry. Everything in those two pictures looks too clean and tidy.

Other than that, nice job!

[arpthark]

Is there a reason you chucked up the mouthpiece instead of the adapter alone?

[MiBrassFS]

I used the mouthpiece as a sort of mandrel to not be working right up next to the chuck in the last couple of steps of hand finishing. Getting grabbed a chuck is no fun! In the first couple of steps the adapter was directly in the chuck. I keep some junker mouthpieces (although, this one isn’t quite a junker yet) around for such duty. (They’re handy to have when soldering sometimes, too.)

As far as clean and tidy goes, in years gone by i used to be at other people’s mercy when it came to that. I hated swimming through other’s messes. Maybe they were just extremes and it affected me… positively!

[bloke]

I think something that stainless steel would be good for would be super thin mouthpiece adapters whereby using them would barely change the insertion depth of a mouthpiece. A lot of times, shank sizes are less than 10/1000ths different in radius, but I think you could make some stainless steel adapters that are only about 10/1000ths thick and that wouldn't cause a mouthpiece to be set out too much farther than it otherwise would have, were the receiver and mouthpiece compatible. If you made a brass one that thin, it would be just too delicate.

All of that rhetoric aside, I prefer that receivers mostly match up with the small end diameters of mouthpipe tubes, rather than just being randomly chosen. I sort of scratch my head at the Yamaha YEP-321 small shank receiver whereby a small shank receiver is soldered onto a medium large bore mouthpipe, but whatever on that. I'm also aware that when that model was first introduced to the market, it was replacing a bunch of American bell front/front-action baritone horns which all used standard /small shank mouthpieces so that's probably why they made the decision to go with that when they first designed the model.

[MiBrassFS]

A SS adapter could probably be done pretty much razor thin. Cerveny used to sell an American to Euro tuba mouthpiece adapter in nickel. It was really thin. The old Willson 2900 adapters were nickel, but they were pretty thick as they had to take up a bit of space. They don’t work on this horn. The knurled ring hits way before the adapter seats.