CALLING ALL FLUTE MAKERS AND REPAIRERS

Irish Flute
1

Hi people,

I have never been here before but I am a sometime contributor the your sister forum over the page on the whistlin’ side.

I have just acquired a vintage keyed fife, circa 1916 of obvious military heritage due to its pouch. It is clear that this instrument has not been used or even SEEN for many many years. It is, however in reasonable condition for a 90 odd year old thing and I intend to restore it.

However, whilst being reasonably proficient at making wooden whistles, I have never had any experience with flutes. I could do with a little assistance if may be so blod as to prevail upon you.

eg. how do I get the keys off without damaging either the key or the wood. Do the pivot pins simply drive out or is there a special technique needed?

Where would I get replacement corks for the keys?

The plug at the embrochure end has clearly been removed or damaged at some time in the past as a crudely shaped wedge of wood has been hammered in. I am assuming that this plug has a significant influence on the tuning and voicing of the flute. Is there a reference document that I could get hold of that gives guidance on the positioning and such like of the plug. Is the position of this like the relative position of the fipple plug and blade on a whistle - quite critical to the creation of the note?

Any help would be gratefully received

Many thanks

Jetboy

2

Terry McGee has quite a bit of info at his site:
http://www.mcgee-flutes.com

Getting in touch with him probably wouldn’t be a bad idea. He is a great flute maker and a very nice person.
There are also other flute makers and repairers on this forum, perhaps you could contact them?

3

Hi,
Welcome to the land of flutes…
The method of removing the keys, is to pull the pin out, there should be a small bent over end on one side. If it is broken off in the block, or refuses to come out, then the fun begins. If you have a very thin shaft you can try to push the pin through from the other side. If the pin is stuck, I use a penetrating oil, and heat up the pin with a small soldering iron to wick the oil in. You want to probably drive out the old wedge of wood and replace it with a cork. This can be had by finishing off a bottle… If you can post photos, that might help.

4

Jon, I wonder if this is a post mount flute - a lot of the military flutes were. Jetboy, can you confirm - are the keys supported between metal posts or set in wooden slots?

If post mounted, I assume they don’t have screws, or it would be obvious how to remove them. They are likely then to be wedge pins - these are ever so slightly conical, so they can only go out backwards. You can usually work it out - the fat end is rounded, the thin end is not. You have to push on the thin end.

If tight, you need to drive these out with a pin punch with a tip smaller than the pin itself - you can probably find or make something from a nail. You need to tap it into the thin end, getting someone else to balance the flute over something that will support the post at the fat end, while leaving room for the pin to pop out. You could use a short length of rod in the vice - drill a hole in the end of it to admit the pin.

Anyway, getting ahead of myself. As Jon has said a picture would be helpful.

Terry

5

The keys are, as you surmise, mounted in metal posts, themselved fixed in some way to the wood, although there is no visible means of holding the posts in place other than, I assume, glue.

Also. I assume that the pins are tapered interference fit pins but there iss nothing obvious to determine which is the fat end and which is the thin end.

I am, naturally quite leery about using a hammer and punch on a post that has been glued onto a piece of wood for getting on for a 100 years but as you say, there is probably no other way.

I have never posted pics on the forum before but I will have a go!

Watch this space.

6

The bottom end of the posts are threaded and are screwed into the wood. As you can imagine, the threaded section is only 3-4mm long, so you are right to be leary about whacking into it with the 2lb club hammer. You can see why I made a point of saying that the spherical head of the fat end post needs to be supported during the operation. We need to avoid any forces being transferred to where the post screws into the wood.

I have occasionally come across flutes where the pin is not tapered - you might have one of these. Try pushing all the pins each way and see if any of them will move. Again, support the far post while getting pushy. Again it helps to have a second person hold the body of the flute with the post on top of the hollow support, and the pin vertical. Then all you have to concentrate on is centering your push. I like tapping with a pin-punch and small hammer as it is very controlled.

Terry

7

Further to Jon and Terry’s good advice, I’d say that the majority of pillar mounted keys (especially on cheaper end instruments as most military band flutes etc. were) that don’t have screw pins have simple straight push pins, not tapered (I’ve hardly ever come across such), but they often will only go in and out in one direction due to having a messy end where they were cut from a longer rod, and the maker only filed one end clean to fit easily through the pillar heads, leaving the other slightly knurly. Many German made flutes are similarly set up. The makers simply weren’t going to go to the added expense of making tapered pins and drilling different size holes in their pillar heads when straight wire pins and uniform pillars were adequately serviceable. They hold where they are in the pillars just by being a fairly tight fit, and by the pressure of the key spring upwards against them. Many will in fact push out quite readily in either direction. Even fairly stubborn ones can often be shifted just with firm pushing with e.g. a brad awl or pin pusher tool - hammering 'em out is rarely necessary in my experience. It can be awkward to get a clear push on some keys, especially the short F, where the axle pin is parallel to the flute body and the pillars are not near the end of the joint: some G# mountings are similarly hard to get at. You need a longer push tool for that, and one without a fat handle. I believe it is possible to get special pin-pushing pliers too, but I’ve never seen them to buy, just being used by a woodwind repairer. In any case, you only need to push the pins sufficiently out (1.5mm) to be able to grip on a protruding end with pliers and pull it the rest of the way, being careful to stay in line with the pillar holes and not to stress their attachment to the body.

8

Thanks for the advice chaps, I will let you know how I get on!
Incidentally, the fife is an English instrument made by HY Potter & Co. of London in 1916. By the look of it, it is Rosewood but a lot of wood looks like rosewood so I cannot be absolutely sure.

Now, as to the pads, these look to be a fair mixture of cork, fabric and possibly leather. I have had a look at Terry’s site (thanks Tery!) on making new pads, however, given that this is a run-of the-mill instrument made for the roughy-toughy Tommy of King George’s Army, I am inclined to believe that the standard would have been cork rather than leather. It looks as though (but until I have it stripped I cannot be certain as they are so full of crap!) that the tone holes have a concentric ridge machined into the rim to create a firn seal against the pad.This might lean toward cork then as the softer leather pad would not necessarily need this ridge.

The keys are ‘salt-spoon’ design so a little advice as to how to form and fix replacemement pads wouold be great.

9

I don’t know this with any certainty, but so far as I do know, cork has never been used to seal keyed tone-holes on flutes by reputable makers. I have yet to see cork used for a key pad on any old flute I have dealt with. Potter certainly wouldn’t have used it thus. If any of the keys on your flute have had cork put in them, rest assured it was a botched and ignorant fix-up job, not original or done by anyone who knew what they were about. The ridges in the key-bed/tone-hole countersink you describe are quite normal and were indeed to try to improve the reliability of the seal of leather pads (and are one reason why using modern skin flute pads is a no-no!).

“Saltspoon” type keys would have been fitted with “purse-string” type soft leather pads stuffed with sheeps’ wool in the early to mid C19th. thereatfer some kind of leather covered felt, with or without a card backing, would have been used. You are best off using modern leather clarinet pads (available from Windcraft in 0.5mm diameter gradations). In your circumstances it may be worth chatting to the woodwind repair person in your local music shop and seeing if they can sell you the small number of pads you need. Insist on leather clarinet pads, not skin Boehm flute pads. If they are too thick to seat tidily in the hollow of the key-cup/don’t get a proper angle on the bed or a sufficient rise from the hole when the key is opened, you’ll need to thin them as Terry describes. I’ve done this successfully quite a few times - open the back of the pad, disassemble the components, slice the felt in half horizontally with a razor blade and reassemble… fiddly, but satisfactory.

10

When he mentioned not damaging the wood, it made me think that the keys were block mounted.
As for cork pads, I have seen them on some old French flutes, so maybe also on military flutes, as they seem t obe either french made or modeled after the French. If the key seat is reletivly flat, you could use foam pads on them. I fill the key cup with melted shellac and then float on the pad. You can get a cheap set of hollow leather punches, and some 1.5mm thick closed cell foam, punch out the desired pad, and presto!

11

Hi,

I have one of these Hy.POTTERs in “F”. I can’t tell for sure, but the pins “appear” to be tapered, or at least one end was cut off flush and the other had a starting bevel. (I’ll have to find out as I have a bad spring on the F#)

The pads are leather. I was told (by Potter’s) that the last ones had a tuning slide. The keys are Nickel “silver” and the posts are a bronze (?)

These are nice sounding flutes…too bad they are HP…although the measurements look like they might play well at 440 with a tuning slide ?

The story is that Chris Norman started on one of these given to him by an uncle…??

12

I have a HY Potter in D with a short foot, it is block mounted and has a tuning slide. I think it was modeled after a large holed R&R, nice littel flute.

13

Ooooo! Ooooo! :astonished: (where’s the emoticon for JEALOUS ?)

14

UPDATE:

(if I am not boring you too much!)

I have managed to remove one of the pins and it is not tapered - a simple cylindrical pin that is a nice tight fit in the posts.

I have removed and dissected one of the pads too and this appears to be a wool filled leather ‘purse’. I would like to try and replace these with the original style- anyone any ideas as to how to do this?

As the instrument does not really play due to the stsate of the pads it is not clear to me as a simple 6-hole fipple flute (OK, OK, WHISTLE) player precisely what key this fife is made to. It looks too long for a D maybe Bb or G? But then research would suggest that military fifes were normally Dand this is clearly a military one. Embrochure to tail end is abput 14"

Jack Bradshaw says …“I was told by Potters…” They can’t still be in existance can they. Certainly never shown up on any Google search.

15

Easy then.

I have removed and dissected one of the pads too and this appears to be a wool filled leather ‘purse’. I would like to try and replace these with the original style- anyone any ideas as to how to do this?

Yes, but it’s a lot of work. It’s only warranted if the hole in the wood is hemispherical. If as I imagine it’s the later “volcano” shape, just select a leather clarinet pad small enough to fit in the cup and the seat, and big enough to cover the hole in the top of the volcano.

As the instrument does not really play due to the stsate of the pads it is not clear to me as a simple 6-hole fipple flute (OK, OK, WHISTLE) player precisely what key this fife is made to. It looks too long for a D maybe Bb or G? But then research would suggest that military fifes were normally Dand this is clearly a military one. Embrochure to tail end is abput 14"

It will be a Bb band flute. Band flutes were in Bb, Eb and F, but for convenience they all pretended to be in D. That way everyone in the band could play every instrument. Must have been a nightmare for the chap who worked out the scores! These flutes are still in use in the Northern Ireland Orange Order Loyalist flute bands. You should be able to find some of these by googling those keywords.

Jack Bradshaw says …“I was told by Potters…” They can’t still be in existance can they. Certainly never shown up on any Google search.

They were in existence until a few years back, in Aldershot. Mostly sold drums, but still serviced flutes.

Samuel Potter, born c1772, joined the Coldstream Guards at 14, left the army in 1817, set up as a drum and woodwind manufacturer, later brass. His son George took over in 1841, passing over to his three sons, William, George and Henry circa 1870. The London operation (first Westminster, then Charing Cross) continued to the 1950’s, the Aldershot operation finally closed a few years back.

They did very good work, if unromantic. Clinton had Potter make his 1851 model flute before setting up his own flute works.

Terry