Since I'm a bit of a gag fetishist and a fan of oral, I've always been interested in open mouth gag designs, however I found that like many things they are a bit more complex to use in reality vs just looking hot with them in a picture.
I had seen minimal designs like ring gags and spider gags, but was interested in the look and security of a harness design. Getting my hands on a harness style ring-gag with modular rings was a good step towards what I wanted, yet this was the first lesson in that there is a difficult balance to having the ring be big enough for my cock to go through and still be a reasonable size for a sub's mouth. Wrapped leather rings are nicer to teeth, but take up more space while metal rings tend to be the opposite.
Eventually seeing some of the harness open mouth gags coming out of Japan they inspired me to start looking into my own variant. The Japanese ones looked sexy and I think the mouth part was a step in the right direction, but was just a sink hole and for some reason they insisted on putting spikes all over the damn thing; Not exactly encouraging to grabbing the subs head toward you. Realizing even if I got a quality one from Japan I wouldn't be happy I was able to find what I thought was a better variant at Tengew Leather. Coming from a machining background they were making custom mouth pieces and plugs to add much more quality to the important parts of the gag. Sadly like a lot of kinky hobby places, they aren't always so good on follow through so I wasn't ever able to get anything out of Tengew.
With more time to think, I came across the idea to try a bayonet style connection to having a plug insert and rotate to "lock" into place. This way it couldn't be pushed out with a tongue and different plugs could be used. Although way complicated, the functionality was hoped to be much more interesting than something simple like snaps that work, but can be a bit of a hassle. Even though the metal rings had their own problems, they did show that having teeth go over a bar helped a lot on spacing as opposed to teeth laying directly on a tube. This gave me the idea for best of both to add teeth slots on a tube. I have a background in 3D, but making the mouth pieces with a full on CAD program was a new concept to me along with getting them made with medical grade rapid-proto materials. In a perfect world it would have been nice to curve the mouth pieces to wrap around one's mouth rather than be flat, but I was worried alignment would easily get messed up. Not really being familiar with tolerances and manufacturing in general, I was happy the flat based pieces even fit together at all when I got them. Sadly white was the only color offered for the best material option I could find and generally rapid-proto stuff comes out looking a bit rough when it comes to exterior texture.
To help with the leather part, finally I was able to get some help from a friend connection with JG Leathers. This guy has probably been having kinky fun longer than I've been alive and makes some incredibly awesome/complicated designs in the name of BDSM fun. It took a while, but JG did come through and overall the first prototype turned out pretty great. It wasn't perfect pretty, but the plug pieces worked as intended, even found the pumping penis gag plug to work as hoped.
Despite being generally pleased, after using the gag more I found that during rough / forced play the first proto position could still slip a little and decided perhaps I'd try and look into an even more encompassing variant. With that thought the Bishop Head Harness over at MR-S Leather looked like a good foundation and I was fortunate that they were able to help me customize it to my gag pieces. The Bishop Gag is already a great head harness foundation, so we actually only ended up doing some small changes of sizing based on knowing the mouth would always be open, rounded the chin area, and added an upper lip pad for comfort. The end result was overall great, sadly the rivets used to mount the mouth piece caused enough standoff that the plugs could no longer fit, but the Bishop gag added a lot more wrap security with all the straps and integrated collar. The larger sized side D-rings are also much easier to grab to guide the sub where I want them, heh that generally being down on my cock. Overall I found the visual look appealing and intense, I just wish the nose area straps laid down closer to the face. That said, the cause of the issue, the lip pad is worth the comfort functionality in my opinion.
In the end the project was definitely expensive and took forever, but I like what I ended up with enough to not have gotten around to another variant yet. One isn't necessarily better than the other with the first one being faster to put on having less straps and has room for a different collar, while the second one requires more setup time yet offers great security and comfort during rough play. I think the project is also a good reminder to other gear makers; don't just make a copy because that is how someone else was doing it. The Japanese gags being a good example, they had a lot of flaws people were copying blindly rather than looking for ways to improve upon the design.
Bonus pics modeled by Penny Barber, check more of her out at: http://naughtylittleswitch.com/
