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[BRS]

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[bloke]

I've wondered about it, but haven't had time to pursue it. What we have to do is to buy all the sizes of Besson and all the sizes of JP and lay them out.
I'm not saying anything you don't already know, and I'm thinking I probably already should have done this.

Since there's no metal sandwich, young scholars sometimes break the tips off by trial-and-erroring them into the casings - rather than using their eyes. Of course - since Yamaha and Jupiter have been doing the metal sandwich thing, they might as well be all metal, because - after a short time - they are noisy, and the same sort of trial-and-erroring causes the tips to be bent uphill, and then they don't work either. Regardless of the issue, there's really no solution to address superlative carelessness.

[BRS]

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[BRS]

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[bloke]

Regarding the metal sandwich guides…

Then when the plastic is gone and the metal wears, the young scholars sometime seem to want to forge a new path for the guide and score the crap out of the casing walls instead of using the designated keyway.

' a good point, which I omitted.

I suspect that any ceramics or plastics that would hold up on their own would be just as noisy as metal, but they might not wear the keyways in the way that metal does. Of course, brass is much more gentle on keyways than would be harder metals like steel, which is what they put in the nylon sandwiches.

Most all of the anti-instrument destruction strategies that manufacturers pursue - in order to address band director complaints - are addressing damage issues that thinking people and a significant percentage of adults (aside from those adults who never change their vehicle oil, drive on bald tires, put buckets under roof leaks and such) would never do to instruments. Curiously, fifty years ago we didn't damage instruments in any of these "modern" ways either. (There wasn't even any wear on the white paint on the bottoms of the second branches of our fiberglass sousaphones.) It's not that we weren't careless or foolharty, but it's because we knew there were consequences for being careless and foolharty with things that belong to others. Additionally, since we were expected to repair our own bicycles and our own other things, I believe we understood mechanics a little bit better. Living in a full-sized three-dimensional world - I believe - taught us far more things than living in a two-dimensional miniaturized phone-screen world.