Heat treatment for mouthpiece?

[zbag]

Hi,

Recently i've came across this heat treatment for mouthpiece.
So would like to ask some suggestion for it if anyone out there who tried?

Personally, i tried it with 2 same mouthpiece (Bobo solo), however one is silver and another with gold plated rim (heat treated).
I feel there's difference in projection and core.

Is there any pros or cons for this? And i'd love to hear some suggestions about it cus i'm thinking of sending my Laskey for it.

Thanks!

[JB]

Snake oil.

+1

[JHardisk]

Ok.. where does one get this snake oil? And do you rub it directly on your mouthpiece? Your Lips? Does it come in a tube? Is it organic? Contain any drying or numbing agents?

[Doug Elliott]

Proper heat treatment for mouthpieces:

First you heat your mouthpiece to about 1600 degrees and hold it there for about an hour.
Then drop the mouthpiece into the snake oil.

This works equally well for brass, stainless, and especially Lexan mouthpieces.

[Dean E]

Annealing is a form of heat treatment. Annealing would be advised when a mouthpiece has been dropped and the shank needs to be straightened. After several shank straightenings, internal stresses may be created and cause cracks and splits in the shank. The annealing process relieves internal stresses and avoids cracks.

For example, see:

Bending mouthpieces
http://tpin.okcu.edu/pipermail/tpin/200 ... 09136.html" target="_blank" target="_blank

Annealing brass ammunition cases:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbRdJqyFDGY" target="_blank" target="_blank

[fairweathertuba]

I don't thnk I've ever seen a truly "bent" tuba mouthpiece. Referring to ^^^^^^ above post.

Steel is actually strenghthened by tempering or repeated heating and hammering I believe, but I'm pretty sure the process would not do anything for a brass instrument mp.

[pgym]

Hi,
Personally, i tried it with 2 same mouthpiece (Bobo solo), however one is silver and another with gold plated rim (heat treated).
I feel there's difference in projection and core.

So, get a third, untreated Bobo solo and a couple of friends, and conduct a series of DOUBLE BLIND play test of the mouthpieces to determine whether there IS actually a discernible difference.

Please post a link to this wonder treatment so that we can ridicule the sot who is trying to separate you from your money.

Well, apparently he's doing enough business to make money off of it:

http://brassinstrumentparts.info/MOMO-F ... 5061315180" target="_blank

http://www.morizono.co.jp/MOMO%20Specia ... gature.htm" target="_blank

so perhaps it would be more appropriate to ridicule the sots who get separated from their money.

p "who suspects the purveyor of this scheme subscribes to the Canada Bill Jones 'It's morally wrong to allow a sucker keep his money' school of business" gym

[augustus]

Ah, no, more appropriate to ridicule the process than people .

[Rick Denney]

Steel is actually strenghthened by tempering or repeated heating and hammering I believe, but I'm pretty sure the process would not do anything for a brass instrument mp.

Yes. Brass is hardened by cold-working (i.e., hammering) the same as steel, which is why you anneal it so that further cold working won't cause it to crack. But you cannot make brass strong by heat-treating it the way you can surface-harden steel by heat treatment. Aluminum, which is a high-fatigue metal, is often heat treated (at fairly low temperatures) to relieve residual welding stresses and avoid future fatigue cracks, but again that does not apply to brass.

Rick "in the Snake Oil camp" Denney

[Doug Elliott]

Heat treating and annealing are two different processes that both involve heat... they seem to be getting confused.

[Levaix]

The other forum I lurk around involves traditionally made medieval swords. At least with steel, the heat treatment and temper make drastic differences in the physical characteristics of the metal, even between different examples of the same types of steel. It's a perpetual joke that newbies to the forum always ask what the "best steel" is, because a good heat treatment makes so much more of a difference in stiffness, springiness, hardness, toughness, etc.

That being said, I'm not sure at all about brass, and it's beside the point that we're talking about different functions, obviously. But it's not entirely ridiculous to think the hardness of the metal could be affected. If it is, I imagine the difference would be more negligible than that between brass and steel. And seeing how the tuba world is SO one-minded as to that difference... lol

[Tabor]

So my initial thought about heating brass is that it might speed the aging process. For certain brass alloys, especially with particular chemicals or enzymes present on the brass, I think it could assist the oxidation process (wear the brass out faster). Snake oil, however, (the real stuff) might be used as a stinky way to help slow oxidation. Snake oil actually worked so well for inflammation that people could make money selling fake snake oil. Technically, it was sea snake oil that seems to do something. Sea snakes ate fish, so it was/is somewhat like a concentrated fish oil. Weatherby (2007) states, "This is no surprise, because, like predatory ocean fish and marine mammals, these ocean-going reptiles eat fish. Sea snakes use the flexible, high-energy omega-3s they obtain from their fishy diets to maintain the fast metabolisms needed to survive in frigid seas.

Compared with omega-3s produced in terrestrial leaves and aquatic algae and plankton, omega-6 fatty acids – which predominate in seeds, nuts and grains – become stiffer and slower at cold temperatures.
In the late 1980’s, San Francisco psychiatrist Richard Kunin, M.D. hypothesized that the oil from fish-eating sea snakes might be high in omega-3s, which would explain its long use in Chinese medical practice as a topical anti-inflammatory agent.

He also knew that, like all long-chain fatty acids, omega-3 EPA is absorbed through the skin, making topical use as a joint balm eminently practical. Dr. Kunin obtained snake oil liniment in San Francisco's Chinatown and sent it off to be analyzed along with oil from two species of rattlesnake, for comparison.
The tests proved that – like most fish oils – the snake oil in standard Chinese liniments ranked high in omega-3 EPA: the long-chain “marine” omega-3 from which the body produces inflammation-moderating chemical messengers called series-3 prostaglandins:

[omitted table]

In fact, the two sea snakes whose oil is commonly used to make traditional Chinese remedies (Enhydris chinensis and Laticauda semifasciata) rank among the richest known sources of EPA, which is much more powerfully anti-inflammatory, compared with DHA, the other key marine omega-3 in fish oil. American patent-medicine peddlers of the late 1900’s sold liniments labeled "rattlesnake oil", but they were unlikely to contain any. And these dubious remedies wouldn’t have done much good if they had. As Dr. Kunin’s results demonstrate, the oil of terrestrial serpents such as rattlesnakes is fairly low in omega-3s.

Oil from one kind of sea snake (Enhydris chinensis) consists of up to 20 percent omega-3 EPA, versus an average of six percent EPA in wild Salmon."

website:
http://newsletter.vitalchoice.com/e_art ... b5PRNLJ0,w

[Rick Denney]

Snake oil, however, (the real stuff) might be used as a stinky way to help slow oxidation. Snake oil actually worked so well for inflammation that people could make money selling fake snake oil....[long explanation of snake oil

If we called it bullshit, would you write an article explaining the antioxidation properties of cow manure?

Rick "just wondering" Denney

[Rick Denney]

That being said, I'm not sure at all about brass, and it's beside the point that we're talking about different functions, obviously. But it's not entirely ridiculous to think the hardness of the metal could be affected. If it is, I imagine the difference would be more negligible than that between brass and steel. And seeing how the tuba world is SO one-minded as to that difference... lol

There are different types of heat treatment. Most conventional heat treatment requires heating steel to the austenitic state and quenching it quickly, which creates a matrix of martensitic crystals in the steel which are very hard. Too much quenching can cause to much martensite formation, making the piece brittle, and too much heat melts the austenitic crystal state which anneals the steel to a soft state. Excessively martensitic steel can be improved by tempering, which heats it up to a lower level to allow some of the martensitic crystals to regroup into austenitic crystals. These types of heat treatment, called quenching and tempering, do not work with copper alloys--quenching anneals the metal rather than hardening it, because there are no martensitic components in the alloy (this is true for most stainless steel, too, which is why stainless fasteners don't come in Grade 8 strength).

Case hardening is another form of heat treatment, and occurs when the heated surface fuses with carbon (usually, or nitrides) or some other material to create a hard wear surface. This is the preferred method for knives--it makes the edge hard without undermining the metal's toughness (i.e., resistance to brittle fracture). It can be done to stainless steel, but I'm not sure about brass.

Precipitation hardening is yet another form of heat treatment. It works by mixing the alloy so that its alloying components go into solution when quenched (as above), leaving the metal in what approximates an annealed state. Then, when it is reheated at a much lower level, these special components that made the metal soft go out of solution and recrystalize, leaving hardened metal, which is made hard either by work hardening or quenching. A very few brass alloys can be hardened by precipitation, but they include beryllium, nickel, or chromium in just the right mix. Yellow brass as used in mouthpieces doesn't contain those alloying components and can't be precipitation hardened. Alloys that can be precipitation hardened will also age harden, when those alloying components drift out of solution over time with normal thermal cycles. But the alloy has to be designed for precipitation hardening, whether it is steel or brass. It's expensive, and that's not what mouthpieces are made of.

But what really makes all this BS is that the stiffness of the metal, and therefore its resonant characteristics, is unaffected by its hardness or strength. The difference between brass and stainless steel is profound compared to the difference between soft brass and hard brass. And both brass and stainless are not even in the same universe as Lexan. If a Lexan mouthppiece can work at all, then the very subtle effects of metal hardness (or residual stress) in a metal mouthpiece are down in the noise.

Rick "noting some mouthpieces made of wood, which is even softer than Lexan" Denney

[TexTuba]

Is this ANYTHING at all like those "hardened steel" mouthpieces that G%W made (make?) I do not pretend to have the intelligence, or willingness, to understand these things.

[Dean E]

I don't really understand how the crystalline composition of a tuba mouthpiece could affect its performance. From Googling, I see that brass (a copper and zinc alloy) can have alpha and beta crystals depending on the annealing process. I fail to see any relevancy. Maybe . . . if the mouthpiece were one of those reed-like gadgets on a child's toy trumpet?

Apparently, guitar strings can be made also from bronze and brass. Annealing strings makes sense, but I cannot link that to mouthpieces.

Three rhetorical, business questions: 1. What is the demand for heat treated tuba mouthpieces? 2. What is the supply? 3. What are reasonable substitutes?

[Levaix]

If we had a karma system I'd give +1 to Rick. I wonder how he knows all that, seems suspicious to me.

[Donn]

I know of a "warm treating" process, guaranteed to improve performance characteristics of the mouthpiece, if repeated frequently enough.

[Rick Denney]

I wonder how he knows all that

Simple. Engineering school, plus the intense study of bicycle frame materials a few years ago (I was researching an article for Triathlete Magazine), plus a review of materials at Matweb, plus reading the abstracts of a paper on the topic, plus what I learned studying the metallurgy of brass spoke nipples used on bicycles wheels (and why they worked better than stainless steel, for a posting on the Hardcore Bicycle Science mail list back in the day), plus reading the Wikipedia article on heat treatment.

Now, if I could just remember where I put my car keys.

Rick "easy, peasy" Denney

[imperialbari]

Sometime in a previous millennium I had a much more low tech experience with a heated brass mouthpiece.

For reasons long forgotten that mouthpiece had ended up on top of a radiator in my parents’ home. It had warmed, but not so much that is was sensed burning on my lips, when I placed it in my instrument. And voila, the response was improved compared to my normal start up of a practice session.

Very simple reason: where the normal start-up room temperature of the mouthpiece at best was neutral towards the blood flow in the lips, then the warm mouthpiece furthered a faster bloodsteam right from the first attack.

Klaus