Dear Friends,
If you are a flute maker, and have ever videotaped the flutemaking process, I would be REALLY happy to get a copy to show to my 6th grade music classes. I have short VHS/DVD documentaries on violin and guitar making, and I would love to have my students see the whole process. Even homemade efforts would be gratefully shown.
Thanks,
Greg Livingston
Bigelow Middle School
42 Vernon Street
Newton, MA 02458
(gregory_livingston@newton.k12.ma.us)
Here’s a Youtube of a Boehm flute being made. http://youtube.com/watch?v=DHSu0trGkRg
Extremely cool stuff!
I am really very surprised, though, that a high-end Boehm-system flute maker uses cast keys…I have always read that forging makes for a stronger key.
–James
Well there you have it… 
I’ve always been a little puzzled by that statement too, but perhaps from the other perspective. Having forged your extremely hard keycup and shaft, you still have to solder them together and on to the hinge tubing, which will anneal (soften) the forged sections. Also, Boehm flute repairers have little handles they temporarily attach to keycups to enable them to bend the shafts slightly to level the cups, say after the flute has had a fall. I don’t see that being possible if the shafts are hardened (you’d probably end up tearing the ribs off the flute!).
Rudall Carte used to soft solder their shafts to the hinge tubing, and I assumed that this was to avoid annealing the shafts. But Robert Bigio tells me that the forged shafts were already hard soldered to the cups, so they were already annealed. I guess they soft soldered the shafts to the tubing to avoid the risk of undoing the cups. And/or perhaps as a “circuit breaker”, so that if a flute is dropped, it will give way at that point rather than damaging the ribs, tube, hinge tube, cups, etc?
So, forging will only end up with a harder key providing you don’t need to hard solder in any later operation. And that’s not always possible or desirable.
Terry