For each class (woodwind / brasswind) to help familiarize us students with different types of repair, we are given a project instrument that we are required to completely fix and turn in for a grade. This semester we were given trumpets, and the above mouthpipe is from my trumpet project.
The tubing in the lower part of this picture is the original mouthpipe. It contained many dents, dezincification (red rot) spots, and was originally misaligned with the bell. If this were a students horn we could have repaired the issues fairly close to new and would have worked great for the customer, but part of our project was to replace the mouthpipe, so off it came.
The assembled mouthpipe on top actually started with the original receiver, outer main tuning slide tube, and new universal mouthpipe. After removing the original assembly from the trumpet, I was able to pull all the pieces apart and machine buff them to a very new finish that matches the universal pipe almost exactly. Once buffing was completed I was able to size and cut the new pipe to the length of the old one. Now, the tricky part of the project was matching the flare of the smaller end to match that of the old one. I say it was tricky, because on most trumpets you would flare the larger end to match the outer tube, but in my case, I had a venturi style mouthpipe that required annealing the brass to get the smaller end to match the receiver. Once I conquered fitting these parts together though, it was fairly smooth sailing from that point on.
All-in-all a detailed project that I am very glad I was able to work on. I still can't get over how nice the new mouthpipe turned out.
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