Furst Pless mouthpiece/tuning bit

[luckej]

Trying to find a mouthpiece for an old-ish Furst Pless horn, or a tuning bit that will fit. The horn itself has no markings other than the traditional Furst Pless badge on the bell. From age and style it's probably German in origin.

The mouthpiece the horn came with appears to be German shank, it goes in a normal amount (doesn't bottom out) but it wobbles around b/c the narrow end is free to move around. Two sets of calipers say the tuning bit is 11mm inside/12mm outside from one end to the other. There is no taper.

Is it made for an 11mm French shank--does that exist? Or does anybody know of a tuning bit that's 12mm outside diameter? The whole tuning bit is only 61mm (2.4") long, so anything made for a flugelhorn would need to be cut down.

Any thoughts/suggestions are much appreciated!
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1971 Yamaconn cornet (my comeback horn)
Reynolds Argenta
Reynolds Professional
Markneukirchen Fürst Pless
…too many others to list...

[Mike Prestage]

French-style flugel leadpipes are all nominally 10mm bore so French-shank mouthpieces measure around 10mm at the main, parallel part. (More likely to be fractionally smaller than larger.) I could easily believe that your Furst Pless was intended to use a mouthpiece in the same general style but around 1 mm larger. However, no remotely mainstream instrument uses a shank like that and even if you did manage to track something down, it could easily turn out to be slightly too small to fit well, or slightly too big to fit at all.

I don't know if there are any flugel leadpipes out there with a nominal outside diameter of 12mm - if there are I think they'd be from rotary valve instruments. They'd almost certainly have a smaller bore than 11mm though and might not actually be a good sliding fit in the receiver on your horn. If you really want a replacement leadpipe, I'd suggest you research the leadpipes in modern Furst Pless horns as a starting point.

The easiest way to stop the wobble would be to wrap some tape around the mouthpiece shank. It might also be possible to get the opening of the leadpipe reamed out enough for the mouthpiece to seat firmly. If you want a 'textbook' mouthpiece fit, by far the easiest option would be to get one or more mouthpieces altered to match the horn.

Mike

[Andy Cooper]

Robb Stewart might be able to give you some guidance even though his website says he is cutting back on his work load. He made a tuning bit for an antique cornet for one of my friends a few years ago.

https://www.robbstewart.com/