Breath condensate revisited

Irish Flute
21

Yeah, I’d agree, Kevin. You can imagine the owner carrying out the teflon taping on this slide, thinking: “I must remember to remove that.” But never remembering. Or perhaps not being able to get it apart again.

At least on the tenons one is going to notice the tape, as you see it every time you pull the flute apart.

When it comes to dealing with a too-loose tuning slide, I prefer to rely on squishing the inner tube just a little to make it just a tad elliptical when the slide is viewed from the end, rather than perfectly round. When it goes into the outer slide, it is forced round again, but acts as a sort of spring, pushing outward. Then of course greasing it with cork grease or any other similar lubricant so as to make it the ideal “smooth but not loose”.

I always make it a rule to squish the sides when the embouchure is pointing upwards. That way, if I want to increase the squish a little more, I know to squish the sides again, not the top and bottom. And if I want to decrease the squish, I squish top and bottom lightly.

And of course you have to be careful in your squishing. Don’t overdo it, and don’t cause any kinks. But I have never run into trouble doing it.

22

They do talk about diet being a consideration, but I haven’t delved into that. Two sugars in the coffee?

23

This stuff works extremely well on loose tuning slides:

https://www.ultrapureoils.com/product-page/ultra-pure-heavy-tuning-slide-lube-upo-heavy?srsltid=AfmBOorX5ZiwVAKVvUO7qyMe_ktyQVcN_li-VuFCutvSi0eQBvsKhup-

It doesn’t seem to dry out or seize up, but who knows what it would be like if you left it untouched for 100 years.

24

Heh heh, indeed. But I reckon it’s better than Teflon which so completely took me in!

25

Having gotten over (at least for the time being) the trauma of getting that slide out, I thought to investigate what condition the head and barrel were in, so ran my usual leakage tests on them, using the Magnahelic Flute Leakage Detector.

As a reminder, the Magnahelic has a big meter marked 0-10. The meter registers 8.0 when completely open to the air, and 0 for completely sealed. A complete flute should show leakage less than 2.0, and preferably a lot less.

So visualise the head, now just a tube of wood with an embouchure hole in it. Plugging the slide end with a bung, and covering the embouchure hole with the palm of my hand yielded a reading of 0.4. That’s very good!

Removing the bung and inserting the nice shiny end of the slide (the wrong end!), yielded 5.4. Bad!
Swapping the slide around and putting the scored and dirty end in the head, 6.4. Even worse!

Wondering if I’d broken something, repeated the first test, still 0.4.

Then thought, aha, is the air sneaking along the outside of the slide/inside of the wood, because I haven’t any glue in there to fill that space? So I taped the outside end of the slide down onto the slide to block that exit. 2.4. Still too much leakage.

Remember the alcohol that I saw oozing out of two cracks in the head earlier on? I reckon one of those is opening up when forced apart by the slide. So, if I go on to fix it, I’m going to have to find and deal with those cracks, as well as getting the slide in securely.

And turning to the barrel, I get a dismal 7.6! That’s almost open air (8)!

Aha, the 6 cracks I mentioned. But taping up the outside of the barrel tightly only gets it down to 6!

Is it also leaking out around the protruding slide? Tape that down tightly, 1.5. So it’s still getting out somewhere.

This flute, being French, has one of those French metal-lined sockets which I seem to remember someone like Rockstro liking. I hate them! You’ll remember that cracks in heads and barrels are caused by the wood shrinking in dry weather, the metal liner not shrinking, so the wood splits. These metal-lined sockets add 3 additional places for such stresses to form. And they are really hard to get out to allow you to work on the cracks. So, I’m guessing that the lined socket is somehow leaking the air. There isn’t any where else, I have the whole barrel tightly taped up!

So, you can see the dilemmas that face the flute repairer/restorer, and cause us to wonder is this flute worth fixing? A glance at the body shows up a number of cracks (at each of the lined sockets!), a missing spring, a very bent key, new tenon corks needed, new pads ditto. And would need the tuning worked on.

And it will never be a work of art. The LH section in particular has a number of poorly patched bark inclusions, and a flash of sapwood.

But hey, what else can you do with an old flute? You’re not going to put it in the rubbish bin!

A retirement project, maybe?

26

Now you may remember this whole revisit was kicked off by one of my flute customers reporting that his flute slide had seized up. I told him about introducing heat to soften the condensate. He later got back to me…

Ok thanks for your advice. I used heat and some muscle together. I didn’t have a rod and flame as you suggested, 
so I used the handle of a butter knife and boiling water to heat it up. Worked great! 

Also I realized I could take all the wood off to avoid risking damaging the wood, so it was just the metal tuning slide (with cork on either end).

So, combining the boiling water method of heating but using a metal rod (in this case a metal knife handle) to transfer the heat into the slide. Whatever works for you is I guess the take home message.

Some might be confused by his last sentence about the “metal tuning slide (with cork on either end)”. He’s referring to my New Improved Tuning Slide, roughly sketched here:

My aim in designing it was to avoid the problem we see in almost all period flutes that make it to Australia, our relatively dry climate shrinks the wood of head and barrel, almost inevitably ending up in cracks. But an unexpected additional benefit is that if the slide does get stuck together with breath condensate, trying to pull the head and barrel apart can easily end up pulling the pair of slides out of one or both pieces of wood.

That might seem like an additional problem, but it actually makes getting heat into the crossover area much easier. I’d probably opt for the spirit lamp at this point, directly applied to the crossover area. But boiling water is probably worth trying first. If it did the trick for the flute in question when transferred by knife handle, direct application to the slide should go well.

And once freed and cleaned up with alcohol and greased, the two cork ended slides will push directly back home in both head and barrel. Job done. New Years Resolution to clean and grease the tuning slide more often noted in diary…