Skiprat, titanium forms an oxide immediately even when it's not anodized, so I don't believe we'll have an issue with galvanic reaction. The acrylic threads onto the shank, and the cup screws onto the acrylic with an extremely fine thread that doesn't unscrew. The cup with rim would be sold as one unit and the shank a separate unit, so it can be less expensive to have multiple mouthpieces. We will have about 80 colors, so students could match their school colors or whatever. Lots of crazy options; laser engraved fingerprints, mokume gane, gold inlay, black zirconium, etc. I am even planning a light system option, where a player could press a button on the horn and have the mouthpiece light up! Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
The titanium is very hard yet springy, so maybe that's what allows them to sound better. I need to research that further. We had the school orchestra director try it and did a blind sound test to all the students. EVERY one of them chose the sound of the titanium mouthpiece over her expensive professional one that we copied the cup geometry from. I've heard that from others that try it as well.
Here's a picture of the cup end. The idea originated from another project I'm working on where I designed a mouthpiece with a continuously variable cup bore by rotating a ring near the cup. I made prototypes of the smallest and largest cup sizes I anticipated in acrylic and screwed that onto a normal mouthpiece that I cut down and threaded. My son took it to school, and kids reaction to that clunky mouthpiece was so great that it made me wonder what might be possible if I tried to make it better styled. I did the cup from acrylic for both machineability and for cool factor. Needless to say, the people that have seen and tried it do like the look and feel of it. I realized that this could be a business that my son could grow into. He's an accomplished trumpet player and likes making stuff as well.
