A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
--John Stuart Mill
A starting point:
The chart below lists the Endsley measured cup depths of Schilke mouthpieces (not all in the current Schilke catalog were measured) sorted by cup depth and rim contour. Mr. Endsley made it clear that the cup depth measurement was really a measurement from the rim to the bottom of the cup, thus the cup depth includes a measurement of the rim depth as well. To be at all useful as a comparison tool, the rim contour needs to be considered with the cup depth measurement; i.e., you would expect that the measurement for the C/4 cup/rim to be different from the C/3 cup/rim because the 4 rim is flatter--in fact, one would expect (wouldn't he?) that the depth of the C/4 to be less than the C/3 since the rim contour would be less. Thus, I have sorted not just the C cups, but the C cups separately with the 2, 3, and 4 rims, and so on.
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If you thought it would be easy to simply ask, what is the depth of a Schilke C cup? take another look at the chart. Nothing is ever that simple.
At first glance, there are a number of screaming anomalies.
In the 4 rim family: The depth of the A/4 cups ranges from an extremely shallow .371 (Bill Chase's dented dime, the 6A4a) to a fairly robust .502 (the 8A4); the B/4 cups range from a fairly middling .467 (12B4) up to a hugely deep .559 (7B4), deeper than all but two of the C cups (the trombone like 22 and 24, which hardly count) and the three the D cups listed, regardless of rim. The C/4 cups range from .493 (13C4) to .532 (9C4). The (two) D/4 cups and the one D/2 cup are as a group shallower than the C/4 cups, ranging from .481 (17D4d) to.519 (11D4).
In the 3 rim family: The depth of the B cups (B/3, really) are very strange. They range .477 (11B, which is deeper than the 11 measurement, .455) to .537 (15B--which is deeper than the 15 measurement, .526). Thus for the 11 and 15, the B cup is deeper than the C. In far cruder testing procedures (my pencil) the 15B I have is clearly shallower than my 15 (I don't have an 11 or 11B), so, doubting that this is a case of four anomalous mouthpieces, I'm guessing that the angle of the throat entering the B cup is such to foster the illusion, measured in a fairly narrow spot, of greater depth and volume. However, patterns being always illusive, there is no stock Schilke 13 to which to compare the 13B (only the 13C4, with a flatter rim, which is .496 as compared to the 13C4's .493--which is about what one would expect because the 13B's deeper rim contour would cause the cup depth measurement to be higher... I think.... I hope...). Of course, one of my favorite mouthpieces, the popular 14B, escaped measurement all together.
The most popular C cups range from .455 (11) to the amazing .626 of the huge 24; subtracting the way past the standard deviation 17, 22, and 24, however, leaves a relatively respectable range from .455 to .526 (15), and similar to the range of the C/2 and C/4 cups.
Taking a look at the Schilke 11 and the Schilke 12: I used to have a very old Schilke 12 cornet mouthpiece (which I bought so I could harvest the shank) which seemed much different from the 11 cornet mouthpiece I bought my daughter to start on, with a much wider rim and shallower cup. I thought it was an anomaly (heavily customized perhaps, but unmarked), but now I'm having second thoughts.
To confuse matters further, let's try to quantify them:
Inside cup diameter (Schilke published data):
11: 0.651
12: 0.657
Outside cup diameters (as measured by Gerald Endsley):
11: 1.070
12: 1.082
The difference in outside cup diameters (0.012) is greater than inside cup diameters (0.006), which would result in the 12's rim being a tiny bit wider. It makes sense that if on can feel the difference between inner cup sizes of .006, that one would notice a rim being 0.012 inches greater. I suppose. Seems like awful tiny numbers to me, but the inner cup diameter of each Schilke mouthpiece size is planned (though many times not executed) to be an additional .005.
Just for interest, the cup depths are generally about what one was a expect, though again, if you can feel .006 in the rim cup, you probably can feel 0.010 in the depth, though notice that the 11 is supposedly shallower than the 12:
11: 0.455
12: 0.465
The next logical question is the 11 or 12 one of those anomalies that Schilke designed for someone in particular? Nope. Neither the 11 or the 12 is an Artist Model, though they are both among the oldest mouthpiece models that Schilke makes. The 11 was once the Model "H" and he 12 the Model "J." Perhaps some of those older models had some built in eccentricities.
© 1999 - 2000 by James F.
Donaldson
All rights reserved