Flute making Apprentices

Irish Flute
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I recently made a reamer for shakuhachi flutes, and this is a tapered reamer whose cutting length is 28" long, which poses a serious problem for milling. “Chatter” (vibration) is a real problem with something like this. It will vibrate like a guitar string :slight_smile: I’ve had the good fortune to work with a master machinist for many years who has taught me a great deal and who works with me on my more ambitious metalworking projects. His solution to the problem of milling long reamers is this fixture here. It bolts to the mill bed and can be drilled to allow the placement of these tower platforms that clamp and stabilize the reamer while staying out of the way of the cutting bit. They can be moved around for different projects, depending upon how much support the reamer requires. It proved highly effective for cutting long “flutes” in the steel taper. The more cutting edges, the cleaner the cut and the less torque and friction created by the reamer. Sorry for the thumbnails–still working on getting full sized images to post directly. As for less involved methods of stabilizing work, paddler had an ingenious solution involving the bench vise for his mill which you can see in the above photo that he posted. I used a different method specifically because I wanted multi-flute reamers.



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I would also add that in the photo that paddler posted of his drawer full of reamers, that represents an unbelievable amount of highly skilled, precision work. I’ve made a lot of reamers, so I have (and anyone who has made their own reamers is also likely to have) a very real appreciation of the amount of work and patience that it represents.

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The following picture gives a clue to my approach. First I use 5C collet fixtures, bolted down to the milling machine table to hold each end of the reamer at precisely the same height. I position these so that they align perfectly with the table. Then I use a self-centering vise, with disposable aluminum face-plates (these will get partially cut away as you mill out the cavity in the reamer, and are there just to protect the vise face plates). I tighten the self-centering vise onto the reamer in the area I want to cut, then I clamp the vice down to the table. For short reamers you don’t need the vice. For medium length reamers you can clamp the vice in the middle of the reamer and then cut the whole reamer without moving it. For long reamers you can reposition the vice as needed, depending on the amount of vibration.

This approach works well for the style of reamer shown, and might also work for producing a reamer with multiple cutting edges, by opening the vice and rotating the reamer in the collet fixtures between cuts … but I have yet to verify this in practice. Geoffrey’s approach definitely works. Doing this stuff for real is a great way to discover the difference between theory and practice. In theory, they are both the same, but in practice they are often different.

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:boggle: Amazing.

Thank you for the pictures and discussion of reamers.


This also explains what Geoffrey meant when he said

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It may be worthwhile to post this question as a new topic in the forum. It is likely that it has been asked before, but it is also likely that new resources have been made available and it is worth asking the question again.

I myself have some reference material for “non-Irish” flutes and reference for making flutes out of bamboo, but I am also certain that there is probably a lot more available from others too.

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To the makers posting pictures and info on making reamers. Wow. Just wow. And thanks.

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It’s true that this is not a subject that gets treated in much detail anywhere online. In part it is because it is pretty technical and unless one has a background in metalworking it can be a bit intimidating. Apart from my communications with paddler, which allowed us to sort of “geek out” together about the various approaches, I’ve been fortunate enough to have a sort of periodic “apprenticeship” with a brilliant local machinist who I mentioned above.

If a would-be maker had access to an open-minded machinist, they might not have to master the art of reamer making because they could simply hire it done (that is what I did for my first couple of reamers). At the time I couldn’t afford the tools that would be necessary (decent size metal lathe and milling machine) to make my own so I made a blueprint and took it to my friend. As time went on I realized that machining skills had a lot of value beyond just reamer making so I took the plunge, got the tools and started studying as often as I could with my machinist friend.

Finding a machinist who is willing to do this sort of stuff is not that easy, either. I have a flute making friend in Omaha who wanted to hire someone to make a reamer and he went to six different machine shops, all of whom rejected the idea. It seems that many machine shops, even though they are populated by so-called machinists, tend to focus on a very narrow market and they are not comfortable thinking outside of that particular box.

So while machinist skills are not de rigeur for would-be flute makers, they are very useful if one is willing to invest the time and money. Plus it is fun and interesting on it’s own! The satisfaction of being able to fabricate your own tools, fixtures, jigs, gizmos and do-dads is an added bonus :slight_smile:

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I might suggest broadening the scope of your search for information. The piping community has a long history of artisanal reamer manufacturing, with many
very clever and non-obvious solutions to making skinny, very ‘wiggly’ reamers to close tolerances. I would, for one, reach out to DMQuinn, a member here, and renowned pipe maker David Quinn, to purchase his cd on pipe-making. Na Piobaire Uilleann also have a storehouse of information and a pipemaking course.
One area seldom touched on is the use of forged forms, one that saw service early in the history of flute making.
You might also examine the history of the Carl Dolmetsch workshop, where they made extensive use of composition reamers made up of hardwoods with tool-steel edges attached.
If your aim is only a small production run, there is little need for a full-scale industrial approach.

Bob

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Very interesting! I had never heard of forged forms and I struck out when I did a cursory search for information on them (my search was fairly shallow) but I’m intrigued. I had heard of creating wooden or composition reamers with steel edges (there is some limited info on these in the The Amateur Wind Instrument Maker) but they present interesting challenges if one is cutting a bore with a lot of perturbations in it.

But when I first started researching reamer making, it never occurred to me to specifically seek out pipe makers! I did find a pretty good PDF booklet on reamer making (it’s on another computer–I’ll dig it out and add the link here) but it was fairly basic. It discussed a variety of approaches to reamer making that were especially useful for hobbyist makers who did not necessarily have access to something like a milling machine. You can do a lot with a small metal lathe and a grinding wheel if you are patient.

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On pipemaking… little tangent here: recently read an old interview with Alex Currie, one of the classic older Cape Breton pipers who kept the tradition alive here. One part of it had to do with making pipes, and he said basically if you were a piper, most of them made their own sets. Matter of factly as if that was not a big thing at all. You found some wood, removed everything that wasn’t a chanter and you were set. There is another interview with Barry Shears, another CB piper, and he mentions using old three edged French bayonets as reamers.

The articles are online at Cape Breton’s Magazine digital archive http://capebretonsmagazine.com/modules/publisher/search.php

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This was a young chap who didn’t fare well in the schools system, coming out with pretty poor numeracy and literacy. Family breakup had been a large part of the problems he had faced. So I put him on in a formal apprenticeship arrangement that had him work 4 days with us and then attend technical education on the 5th day. That worked well for him, and he settled down into being a reliable and committed worker, and did well at his studies. To the point that when we moved down to the New South Wales South Coast (160K, 100 miles from Canberra) he moved down to keep working with us. I never really saw it as likely he would go on to become a flutemaker though - he wasn’t a player and didn’t have the player’s motivation. In what I thought was a nice outcome, his previously-estranged father invited him to join him in a new business.

I also had another chap start work with me when we moved “down the coast”. He was the husband of a musical friend, and was at a loose end at the time. Again, he became a good solid worker, but again, lacked the motivation to take it further. When my backlog of work was clearing up, he took a great job at our Council, sampling and testing water and other environmental materials.

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Great examples and accounts of reamers and reamer making - well done guys!

A good question to consider is how do you know your reamer is sharp enough? I reckon it has to pass the Cadbury Flake Test. (I’m assuming and hoping here that Cadbury Flake chocolate bars are moderately universally available.) If the wood comes off as dust, the reamer isn’t yet sharp enough. If it comes off resembling Cadbury Flake chocolate, I reckon you’re getting there.

Consider what you are asking your reamer to do. Take a cut up to 16" (400mm) wide across the grain in woods too hard and abrasive to chisel or plane. It’s a lot to ask! So sharpen often!

Terry

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I had never heard of a Cadbury Flake before but it is the perfect image of reamer cuttings :slight_smile: And now I want some chocolate. Thanks a lot, Terry. (Sounds of me rummaging in the chocolate drawer)

My first reamers were D-profile reamers because they were pretty straightforward to make. Just turn the taper then mill away just shy of half the diameter. The downside to this type of reamer is the friction. Even a freshly milled and sharpened reamer creates a lot of friction in this configuration. This is even more so for me because I don’t use an oil finish inside of my bores and therefore do not use any sort of lubrication when reaming (such as a wax or oil) because it would interfere with my bore finish later on. So if I’m dry reaming a lot of blanks with one of those reamers I need to cool it in between flutes (I feel a bit like an old world blacksmith dumping water onto steel that is hissing-hot!). And keeping them sharp becomes an issue as well. I don’t make them from tool steel or any of the harder alloys because milling the harder alloys is more difficult. One can use something like 4140 steel (which I’ve used a couple of times) or tool steel and get reamers that will hold an edge much longer, but milling them is sloooowww. I use 12L14 steel (which contains lead in the alloy that acts as a natural lubricant when you machine it) which is much easier to machine, but it also dulls more quickly. So it’s a trade-off. All of my early machining experiences were with the 12L14 alloy, and the first time I went to machine stainless steel it was an eye-opener!

Jon’s method of using the ball nose end mill is a step better in terms of creating a nice back-rake to the cutting edge and giving even better chip clearance. My latest approach of creating reamers with multiple cutting edges makes for cleaner cuts, exponentially reduced friction and much less torque (I’ve cracked flute blanks by getting too aggressive with my old reamers). They are an improvement in every way except chip clearance (I have to pull the blank off the reamer to clear chips twice as often, but it’s a small price for the improved cut). The other advantage is that the more cutting edges a reamer has, the longer it stays sharp since they share the load. I considered doing six cutting edges, but that would reduce chip clearance to almost nothing and the reamer would constantly clog.

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Getting back to the general notion of apprenticeships, it seems to me that it’s not a generally viable thing, for the many reasons already proffered. Imagine you live in Cincinnati, and decide to do an apprenticeship with me in Australia. You drop your day job, fight with the immigration people over a visa, sever your family and friendship ties, fly halfway round the world, find somewhere to stay in our retirement/coastal resort environment, get paid a pittance, learn a lot, fly home, find somewhere to live again, find another day job to recapitalise, slowly build your resources as funds allow, finally get it all together having rather forgotten a lot of what you’ve learned, and thus take a while to pick up where you’d left off, financially, emotionally, flutemakerly. Not attractive.

It did strike me some time back that a better approach might go like this. You stay in the day job in Cincinnati, you stay in your current house, stay with your friendships and relationship. You undertake an i-apprenticeship with me (or another maker, but I’ll get to that!) I send you some written material on whatever the topic-de-jour is. You try it out, fail miserably, come back to me and we work out why. Once we’re over that hurdle, we move on to the next topic-de-jour. There will be plenty of them!

Success of course breeds confidence, and finally you have a product that you can be proud of. So discussion turns to marketing, and making it better. Only when you’re starting to earn an income do you drop the day job.

Now, what’s the catch, you ask, and why did I say we’d come back to the question of makers? Whoever took this on at the maker end would need to prepare an awful lot of information. For that to be worthwhile (or at least not too big a drain), the maker would need quite a few i-apprentices. And the information packages would not be cheap.

But cheaper I’d guess than a return flight to Australia!

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How do you sharpen reamers without compromising their ability to maintain a shape to thousands of an inch? Is this why you’d ‘mill away just shy of half the diameter’ (so there’s room to sharpen the cutting edge without narrowing the profile)?

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Good question!

Let me fudge by offering a few responses…

Yes, I think that’s one reason to “cut above the line” (“the line” being the equator).

A second reason to cut above the line is that if you cut below the line you will definitely be reaming undersized. If you cut too far above the line you will still be reaming at the right size, but you will be reaming less efficiently.

But thridly (thridly? Arghhh. You know what I mean), I think the absolute size is less important than the relative size. So a few thou undersize or oversize won’t be a killer. But I haven’t investigated that, so treat as provisional!

(Despite my best efforts, there is much more to discover. Somebody out there, treat that as a personal challenge!)

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I’ve never done any sort of exhaustive comparison, but this has been my experience so far as well. The shape is more important that the actual size in terms of the bore profile. I’ve put this to the test by finishing the bores of my flutes with a thin, clear coat epxoy. The epoxy effectively constricts the bore by a few thousandths of an inch (I would guess as much as .005 in some cases) and I’ve never noticed that it had anything but a positive effect. The bore shape stays the same for the most part (though I suspect the epoxy even alters that by a little bit here and there) and any potential negative impact has been more than offset by the increased responsiveness created by a nice smooth bore!

I’ve also always assumed that any number of the antique flutes that players love have probably shrunk a bit over the last century or two and that their current bore profile is no longer what it was when it was originally reamed.

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Thanks for sharing your perspective, Terry.

I happen to live in Ohio not too far from Cincinnati, so it wasn’t hard to imagine. :stuck_out_tongue: The i-apprenticeship type of situation sounds like a good one. For me, the in-person apprenticeship idea is appealing because of issues like the reamers which boggle my mind a fair bit, but you guys are right about the impracticality of modern in-person apprenticeships. I work in the metals industry so I can understand the values of different alloys, but I don’t have experience with machining at this point so I’ll need to find a good machinist friend like Geoffrey Ellis did.

Regardless, I have a few years still before I will be at the stage of life where I can afford the equipment, time, and space for wooden flute-making. (I have done bamboo flute-making in the past. But now that I am in Ohio, I don’t have access to as much space or bamboo as I did while in Texas.) It is because of my bamboo flute-making past that I daydream about the idea of an apprenticeship but in reality, I haven’t even owned a wooden flute of my own yet… (Though I’m 5 months in on an order for a flute from Terry.)

All that aside, I’ll keep watching for new flute-makers as they come on the horizon.

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Aaron, have you thought about visiting Dave Copley? I believe he lives in the Cincinnati area.

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Oh, I had not realized he lived in Ohio. I will have to consider contacting him. Thanks for pointing it out.