Hmm, Kevin, can’t tell from the OP’s pictures, but the sockets appear to be maillechort. My dealer’s flute, marked Douglas and Co. of London, of clearly French manufacture is considerably newer, and has high quality maillechort, and wouldn’t know what verdegris was if it came up and bit it. . .The German alloys, typically made under the patent for Alppaca will tarnish appreciably. Haven’t really been up close to any RR or similar English flutes with so-called GS (German Silver) furnishings. Maybe they avoid the problem by using Brittania Metal which is also quite tarnish resistant.
verdegris is just the green slime seen on nickel, brass and copper parts. All the French flutes I have worked on used silver for the sockets. They will crack the sockets, when the wood shrinks around the liner…
That seems to be what has happened on mine. The two cracks I most recently noticed are on the called sockets. Just wondering, what’s the point of putting silver caps on the socket to reinforce it, if they’re just going to cause the wood to crack?
Well it must be the relative ‘youth’ of my flute. . .a spring chicken at 90+ years, and no crack in the reinforced sockets of the body. Predictably I had to deal with a crack in the tuning barrel, but the cracking was at the opposite end to the reinforced socket. Go figure.
There are some factors that go into it,; curing time of the wood, type of wood, if the flute spent the majority of it’s time in a humid climate, did the maker allow for some shrinkage, is the socket wall thin, etc. I have seen lined socket uncracked, but as Terry points out on his website, eventually the cellular structure of the wood will collapse, as the wood drys out, and meet with the unmoving metal liner… The ticking time bomb…
Yup. And if I were to build this flute today I would probably follow Terry’s method. However, as it is now, since it is my everyday flute, and I live in a humid climate, and I keep huffin’ and puffin’, and God willin’ and the crick don’t rise. . .
Yeah, I could tell it was nickel silver of some sort, but thought I’d pass on my own experience and give the owner a head’s up anyway, since all sorts of metal corrode and you likely don’t want to be breathing in its condensation any more than necessary.
To save readers the bother of looking this stuff up maillechort and Alppaca are just more names for nickel silver, i.e., alloys of zinc/copper/nickel. One document I came across gives maillechort as 60-63 Cu, 17-19 Ni, “rest” Zn. Depending on the proportions they can be easier or harder to work, tarnish more or less readily, etc. The price doesn’t seem to vary much, really, from what I’ve gathered.
Britannia metal is “typically 92% tin, 6% antimony, and 2% copper,” I seriously doubt you’re going to make any kind of musical instrument with such flimsy stuff. German/nickel silver is usually “60% copper, 20% nickel and 20% zinc.” A friend who builds uilleann pipes and did all my flute repairs is a bit desperate trying to get more of the proper alloy as the local supplier seems to have run out/aren’t exactly easy to deal with. He needs the precise amount of each metal or the color just isn’t right, he knows from having tried that it will be too hard to work as well. So there’s that. They’re all a pain to work in comparison to brass, too, being much more harder and brittle.
It turns out that the woodwind repair person at the University of North Texas, just half an hour away from me, has experience working on wooden flutes like mine. It would have cost $300 to get it all fixed, but she said she could do everything but repairing the broken key for only $100. I figure I’ll put a rubber band or something around the key to hold it down so that I can play the flute minus that one note. If I ever have a couple hundred bucks lying around (or if I decide to try to sell it), I’ll have it fixed, but for now, this should suit me just fine. I should have it back in a week or two; I’ll let ya’ll know how it turns out!
Sounds good. As a long term solution to your key repair, you might try contacting Lars Kirmser,http://www.musictrader.com/, and get a bid. He regularly fabricates replacement keys, and has a large stock of replacement keys of various sorts on hand. Among his other activities, Lars runs a vocational arts instrument repair school and administers the Yahoo Instrument Repair Technicians group. Good luck!
I got the flute back yesterday, and it looks good. All the sections are airtight, and she gave it a nice cleaning. I can play it, but some of the notes are pretty badly out of tune. Is this something that is to be expected with a flute that hasn’t been played in so long, and they’ll go back in tune as the wood gets rehydrated? Or will it require more work?
Flutes from that era were designed to be played a little differently to modern flutes.
For example you should vent the C key when playing C#.
You should vent the Eb key kind of all the time but at least for G, F# and E
You should vent an F key when playing F# too
Have a look through the Fingering charts thread on this forum.
Well, I’ve been playing the flute for a month or two now. I’m still getting used to the old-fashioned fingerings, but that will come. My concern now is that most of the notes, especially in the lower octave, are very weak sounding, MUCH weaker than my Forbes. I’d be pretty disappointed if it was just a bad instrument, so is there something I might just be doing wrong as compared to the Forbes? Or do these old flutes just sound like that? I’d like to get an experienced Irish flute player to take a look at it and give it a play, but it’s a while till the next Irish or Scottish festival in my area. Are there any of you living in the D/FW area of Texas, by chance?
Your antique is a small holed flute and it’s not going to be very loud, especially in the lower octave. The Forbes on the other hand is a large-holed Pratten design and is probably one of the loudest flutes you’re ever going to come across. The Forbes also has one of the strongest bottom D notes you’ll ever find but at the same time it suffers in the upper octave as far as tone is concerned. The two flutes have very different designs so you can’t really compare them to each other.
