Skip to main content

How To Temporarily Fix an Old and Compressed Saxophone Neck Cork

By November 18, 2015January 6th, 2016saxophone articles

After a while we all face a saxophone neck cork that’s just too compressed to properly hold the mouthpiece in place. Replacing this old neck cork is the best fix but if you can’t get to your local sax shop or you don’t have all the things you need to replace the cork yourself you can quickly and easily fix this problem with just a little bit of heat.

12 Comments

    • Johnny,
      Thank you for this post. Another variant of this approach I read about involved dipping the cork in hot water. This hot water approach might have some advantages in that it does not get the cork as hot as the lighter approach. Just a thought.

      Walter

    • Ary Neiva says:

      Hello Johnny, good morning to you.
      Johnny, it’s a really nice tip for a temporary fix a the compressed neck cork!
      This works very well in an emergency. Living and learning!
      Thanks Johnny. As usual you are always giving to us an important lessons that for sure are welcome!
      Have a nice day

  • Great tip Johnny, very cool. When my bro-in-law gave me the LJ Hutchen, I had the same problem with the cork..the MP wouldn’t stay in place because it was too compressed. I wish I had known about this tip then, would have really helped, thanks for sharing. On a side note, there’s a bunch of posts from the last 4 days or so on your forum that are gone, don’t know what happened, Saxophone videos of Clarence Clemmons playing with Brenda Lee/your response to that video, etc.. Sure hope you can rig up something the next time you’re playing live on stage so we can see what you’re doing when you play with a band like we talked about (those comments are gone too).

  • Just hold the cork over the steam from the kettle for a few seconds.

  • jake says:

    Thanks Walter. I was having this issue with my tenor cork. Was bout ready to take it in to the shop when I saw this post. I boiled a pot of water and stuck the cork end in for a few seconds and wallah, seems like new! Sure its only temporary but saved a trip for now! Thanks for the tips guys!!

  • Barry says:

    I’ve found that a hair dryer works pretty good as well. Less likely to burn the cork.

  • Hi, good tip!
    If this doesn’t help anymore and you need a quick long lasting fix without changing the cork (maybe we want to test a new MP wich needs a thicker cork) you can use a surgical tape for that. In Germany we use Leukosilk wich is available worldwide i think. This tape is thin, good to handle and can be removed without destroying the cork.

    I needed to do this with the neck of my baritone while choosing the proper MP for it.

  • David Lekan says:

    Sirs! Our church just bought a new alto sax. And am sent to go and learn how to play it. Av started about two months ago. Sirs i need some tips and lesson on how to play sax. Thanks from David.

  • Jon Akers says:

    Thanks, Johnny. I’ll remember this video if I ever have a compressed cork. However, at this point, I have a different cork problem; I play a tenor sax, and it really isn’t that old, but I recently went to pull off the mouth piece, and it tried to take the cork off with it. Well, most of the cork anyway… The front bit of the cork is still attached to the neckpiece, but most of the back (I’ll say all but about 1/2 an inch) almost slid over the front bit. I don’t really have time to get it professionally fixed at this moment, nor do we really have any decent shops to do it nearby. I was wondering if you had any tips for that, or a video to point me in the right direction. The only stuff I could find was to use masking tape, but that won’t really work for this scenario. Any suggestions? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    Thank you,
    Jon.

Leave a Reply