I’ve had my Balu mute for over ten years, and for the past 6 months it’s steadily been losing cork. Today I finally took the time to do a little bit of emergency mute repair and recork it. The total time was around an hour – and about 30 minutes of that was just waiting for the cement to harden.
Before mute repair:
And after:
The most difficult part was aligning the corks with the old cork position. Scraping off a little bit of the wood finish from underneath the old cork area made it relatively simple to line up, though.
The mute, which was sounding pretty quite and had very interesting intonation tendencies, is now working quite nicely. These new corks appear a little bit thicker than the old corks were (even when new), and while this doesn’t seem to have any impacts on intonation, it does give the mute a nice and relatively loud muted timbre. Not bad for a few bucks in cork and a little bit of time.
If you have a favorite mute that’s losing its cork, don’t replace it. Go over to BaluMusik.com and check out his horn mute cork replacements.
