Info sought: humongous mouthpiece

[arpthark]

I bought this for my Kaiser-shank Alexander. It fits, but it’s actually almost a little too big in the shank. It tops out at around 16mm for the shank diameter.

Anybody recognize this or have any idea about its provenance, or what horn this would be used in? The taper seems kind of extreme. For reference, my Alex receiver is one of the old really big ones at about 15.5mm.

It’s also massively tall/long. I’m posting pics of it next to a Helleberg for reference. The rim is very wide, fairly flat, with a sharp inner bite. The cup isn’t huge.

[Tom C]

The cup looks shallow like a typical f tuba mouthpiece. No idea why a bass tuba mouthpiece would have such large outer dimensions though.

[humBell]

I may have a holton neck it might fit, or one other tuba comes to mind, being an old french make that came with king receiver as an adaptor.

Also see the bloke's big horn thread for applicable adjectives.

[russiantuba]

Going to hijack this thread:

I believe Alexander tubas had at least 3 common shank sizes. It almost makes me think that some mouthpieces were designed for some tubas. For example, for the Conn 5XJ series and potentially the King 2341 newer style, a Bobo symphonic was used in some of the final testing. Abe Torchinsky mentioned the mouthpiece that came with the horn is good enough.

I almost want to think that some of these mouthpieces might have been designed to fit specific horns. The whole euro vs standard debate wasn’t prevalent 40 years ago from my knowledge. One I started to hear about 10 years ago was there was a P shank for Perantucci mouthpieces and potentially B&S Horns (have not checked the gap).

It is very possible that this could have been designed for a one-off horn. I had a student purchase a Miraphone 181 F tuba, the one where the 5th valve was the same length as the 4th. Each of the rotors had bearings in the valves, and the receiver was one of the strangest issues the repairman (who is a tuba designer) had to fix—all were modifications.

Tinkering with horns isn’t a new thing. This could have been a mouthpiece custom made to fit a certain horn experiment.

[arpthark]

I mostly wondered if this looked like something that came with those old vintage Yorks and Holtons with the huge receiver.

My Alex 163 has a very large shank (Doug Elliott A+ size), but I wonder if contemporary 164s had an even larger receiver.