Tuba mouthpiece case

thingiverse

Tubas can be a real hassle to lug around, especially on school buses or when carrying them in a backpack. School-age tuba players often have two tubas: one at home and one at school, but they usually have their favorite mouthpiece that they carry back and forth between the two locations. However, kids' backpacks can be brutal environments for delicate instruments like tubas. This particular case provides excellent protection from scratches and dings by offering a friction-fit slip-on lid with an air hole to prevent things from getting too soggy when not in use. Print Settings: Printer Brand: SeeMeCNC Printer: ORION Delta 3D Printer Rafts: No Supports: No Resolution: 0.35 mm Infill: 10% Notes: I printed the lid using Soft PLA, which makes it flexible and stays on nicely. However, my print settings still require tweaking - this was the first real object I printed with the printer - but here they are: Bed temp: 25 C Extruder temp: 230 C Speed, infill & perimeters: 20 mm/s Fan: off Extrusion multiplier: 1.05 The angle of the top lip of the base might make the lid stay even if it's made from a more rigid plastic like PLA or ABS. If you try it, let me know how it turns out! How I Designed This: I initially tried using this trombone mouthpiece customizer but found that it didn't support dimensions large enough for a tuba mouthpiece. Next, I attempted to use this customized version of the project with a 118% scale factor as recommended. It printed decently, but the diameter was too small in some key areas for my Bach mouthpieces. This made me realize that these tuba mouthpieces aren't just scaled-up versions of trombone mouthpieces; the profile is quite different. Then I tried using a similar approach to ckirby's, employing Bezier curves. I measured the diameter of the mouthpiece at various heights and entered those coordinates into my OpenSCAD script. I attempted to fit the curve to those points, but it was frustrating as changing one part of the curve affected other parts. It seemed challenging to get the curve to converge where I wanted it. So, I wrote a cubic spline library and used that. I employed the "preview profile" mode in the script (see picture below) to adjust the spline (blue) to fit the measured points (in red). Since cubic splines pass exactly through their control points, this was relatively straightforward to do. The libraries are included in the source ZIP file and can also be found on GitHub.