In the pocket!

Again it's been long since my last update. In fact, the course is in recess for the summer right now. But since that time, I have mainly been playing my finished flute. It plays sufficiently loud amongst the other instruments, while sounding even more subtle in group recordings than my French flute, so to me, that's a big mission accomplished!

I have to give you an update on the bottom D, though. After asking around on the Chiff 'n' Fipple forums, I learned that the flare for a D foot has to be substantially larger than that of a C foot, because of the average bore diameter vs. overall length ratio being different.

I don't think that I can completely fix that on my current right-hand section, since it is probably already too sharply tuned and too thinly walled to mend the issue completely. So instead I want to start the next season by making a new right-hand section.

But overall I'm quite happy with the end result. Here are a few clips I've recorded for demonstration purposes (nothing too fancy):

Gwenegan
Le Beau Rosier

But now for the best news. My friend and fellow band member Deborah was so kind to spend a band evening on sowing me a flute bag, using my most favourite of her designs: the Bunny Band (with Wooden Flute Bunny!)

(Due to the repetition of the pattern you mostly see Flute Bunny, Guitar Bunny and Button Box Bunny, which means you're missing out on Fiddle Bunny and Drum Bunny. I'm telling you: they're equally cool!)







Now why did she get to sign her flute bag, while I forgot to sign to my flute? How dumb of me!

Hole in one, and other holes

A lot of stuff has happened since the last update, starting with drilling the first hole: the embouchure.

Fortunately I have been able to see some wonderful examples, a.o. from a fellow coursist, and I enjoyed the good and timely advice from the folks over at Chiff and Fipple. All this information, and my own interpretation of it, of course :-) , got me an embouchure that got it right from the start.

Unfortunately, the wood proved to be too porous to sound the lowest note (at that time the instrument was still cut to a 'C' at full length). The wood was far from airtight -- suction tests sucked big time -- so I finally decided to go with my teacher's suggestion here and have the (as yet untreated) bore varnished (vs. oiled with linseed). The immediate result was a solidly playing base note!

Normally the rules with embouchure cutting is "if it sounds perfect, don't touch it", but this time I wanted to learn by copying the measured diameter of the original. So I spent the following classes on gradually widening the oval embouchure hole and re-working it to keep it sounding well. This worked out pretty OK, although of course now it's too late to compare it with my initial attempt.

Next came the finger holes. I drilled them before cutting the flute to 'D' size -- this wasn't what I wanted, but because of a few communication errors that's what happened, anyway.

The right hand section went OK, but when I spent half of the class finding an '8' drill for the left hand section, I eventually drilled the wrong hole with it, directly after I had found it. (It was inside the drill, where I had left it myself.) Oops. Fortunately, I had also made the left hand section a tad longer than on the Rudall plans, to have some spare trying to adjust it from its said 442 Hz to somewhere between 435-440 (in which range I believe the button box is tuned which I accompany), so that eventually countered it. I think I subsequently moved the other holes somewhat more towards their original position, which actually left me with a fairly comfortable fingering (I'm used to a stretch, though), with, after tuning, the three left hand section's holes around the same size. No sweat here... :-)

The next week I crudely cutted the instrument to 'D' size. A bit too crudely to my own liking (but let's just say there was another communication thingy going on), resulting in a flute that was already too high in the second octave (IIRC).

To balance the octaves, I had to expand the bore at the end, for which I intended to use the same (metal) reamer that I borrowed to ream the foot section. Unfortunately it wasn't available at the time, so I ended up using a Clarke's Original (well, the Victorian, actually) with a bit of sandpaper around it. It took much more reaming than I had expected! On the original drawings, the bottom expanded from 10.5 mm to 10.7 on the bottom 'C' -- a hardly noticeable increment. On my instrument, the bottom 'D' eventually expanded from ~12.5 to ~14mm I still don't know why it's different; my current theory is that the taper matters more on the high end of the flute -- a reason why some bores flatten towards embouchure.

Now, after a week of sulking over the crude 'C foot' amputation, I took my griefs back to class to my teacher, who, cheerfully, told me that it all sounded quite OK, a little too low actually, and I should stop looking at the needle of my tuner, but use my ears instead. So after another evening of tuning I eventually came around and didn't feel too bad about it, at all.

But the real test was to play with my group, so I took my unvarnished flute to band night, where it actually got quite a good reception. It was loud, and the F sharp was in tune (as opposed to my French, baroque style flute), which actually made some tunes in 'C' harder to play on it :-)

The sound was also quite OK already, although somewhere between the embouchure widening, the finger hole placement, the foot amputation and subsequent flare reaming, I had lost my solid bottom 'D' (which is kind of a quality mark with Irish flutes). I hope to get it back when it's varnished overall; especially the varnish on the expanded flare and on the embouchure hole still could make the difference. (I may also have to sand the inner bore once more to remove unevennesses in the varnish.)

The pictures I took over this period are unfortunately all quite vague:

Right now, the flute's already up to it's next stage, which is being varnished all over. I eventually opted for this kind of finish instead of linseed oil, because it adds a nice hard layer to this vulnerable softwood. Again, my teacher's doing the actual varnishing, so I feel a little bit naked right now without my flute. I hope that when it comes back it will be the looker that I worked so hard for, and that the smooth overall coating will return me a solid bottom 'D'. Fingers crossed!

Outer Shaping

The past two weeks I've been working on the outer shape of the flute. First of the middle section, which actually includes the sockets, so at the end of that I could fit the part of my flute together! (The foot section still remained a crude conoid for another week, though so it didn't look like much in the beginning :-) )

I've found out the hard way that the wood cones that we normally use to center the pieces with a finished internal bore shape don't cut it for fragile structures like a 3mm pearwood socket. They don't cut it -- they break it, because of the pressure put onto the socket by the conical shape. So after some glue on the largest socket, the second week I've set out to make a wood cylinder to snugly fit the bore instead. Several sections later I had adapted this cylinder so often that it had become all stepped:

And in the end I had three different sections, all already quite close to their final shape:

And fitting together!

Making Ends Meet

Today (actually, last monday) I felt a little bit like these guys:

...since I finally finished the bore of the flute's middle section, and with that, the complete bore.

I had to make another drill bit for it first. This time, I've documented which materials I've used, as you can see below. Especially the soldering powder I had forgotten about already. So for future reference, here's the whole deal: 1) Use water or saliva to get the powder to stick to the drill bit. (Don't cut your tongue :) 2) Add the copper tube, and put the tiniest chip of silver solder on top. 3) Heat up the whole with a gas burner; and 4) you could try to harden it a bit by putting it in directly water afterwards.

I also finally found out how the wooden reamer was to be used. We clamped a genericly shaped, but sharpened metal strip together with the stick that I had turned before, and then we used that whole contraption to ream out the bore by hand. It all went pretty smooth (didn't even need any linseed oil for this one), even though the metal wasn't even screwed onto the wood (although that would have been an option). Piece of cake!

Lost & Found

And then, all of a sudden, the copper tip on my drill was gone. I've looked for it everywhere -- yes, also in the wood. But I didn't find it.

Eventually I decided to cheat and drill on without the copper guide. (I was only a few mm from being done!) And there, within the flute-to-be, I found it back:

All mashed up by the drilling. Remember, I looked there before, too, but apparently it was completely hidden inside, only to come out by further drilling.

Wooden Reamer Pt. 1

Here's me turning a wooden reamer with a ratio of 55:1 (every 5.5cm the diameter is reduced with a millimeter). It's going from 19 cm down to 13 cm over (bear with me here... yes...) 33 cm exactly.

The ratio was derived from the actual Rudall & Rose measurements I mentioned earlier and actually matches them quite nicely: overall the measured bore is quite straight in its slope, and especially so in the mid-section, for which this reamer is intended.

The wood is maple; if I have to guess it's because it is smooth and malleable but at the same time strong enough and not particularly sensitive to friction. (That is, with pearwood at least you often smell smoke when drilling it...)

I started out trying to make the reamer in steps of 1 mm, until I was instructed to do it smoothly from the hand. Whew!

But I succeeded, as you can see below. Here, the next step is also done -- the cone is cut in half, using the blocks at the end as a guide for finding the middle. The part with just one block intact will become the reamer; a metal strip will be added, which does the actual scraping.

What I haven't quite figured out yet, is how I'm supposed to find the center of the reamer again to create a mount point, now that I've already cut the blocks in half.

Boring!

The previous week was mostly spent on creating the tool in the photograph below, by filing down a normal drill bit to somewhat more square proportions, and silver-soldering the piece of copper on its otherwise sharp tip. This copper piece has exactly the same diameter as the pilot hole that was drilled in the wood earlier, and ensures that the drill follows this guide exactly instead of scraping its own way. I also had to file down the width of the drill bit, since I required a somewhat irregular size for the socket. The piece of black tape marks up to where I want the drill to enter the wood.

Next, it was time to drill the actual bore. First the socket, using the drill I just made, then gradual steps from 14mm down to 11mm for the right hand / foot piece. (Luckily most of these drills were already filed down by people before me.) Finally I was able to use an already existing reamer, too. For the left hand (middle) piece, I'll have to make my own reamer, which will be mostly wood with a metal scraper, but that is yet to come.

To ensure a smooth flow of the reamer, some linseed oil was applied, which leaves quite a color mark on the wood (its first oil ever!), and actually makes it smell like a fresh salad.