I got an Olwell keyless in October, after ordering it 15 months before. I love the flute, it’s a real joy to play, but just now I noticed this alarming crack in the center section
The flute is kept in a pelican case with two digital hygrometers monitoring the humidity level, and it’s never dropped below 60%.
I guess they can repair it–I emailed the shop today. This is why I hesitated to buy a wooden flute in the first place. It cracked in less than four months!
That’s very sad and it shouldn’t have happened. I wonder if the hygrometers are not accurate. You should put them in the open and see if they register the drop in humidity. If they don’t then they are defective. The best place to buy a hygrometer is at a store that sells expensive cigars. Get a couple and expect to pay
$20 or so each. I use a large tupperware container where there is space for air to move around in and keep the humidity at 60% with pieces of clementine peel. I’ve never heard of an Olwell flute cracking. Perhaps the wood was defective and the defect wasn’t visible. I don’t know if it helps, but I always put oil on the outside body of my flutes when I oil the bore. I’ve had my flutes for quite a few years and live in Canada where the indoor humidity in the winter frequently goes down to 20. Never a problem. Chet
I got two small digital hygrometers figuring their inaccuracies would average out. They are usually with 3-5 points of each other, like one will say 67 and the other will say 70 or 71.
I have been making a point of going to more sessions lately, so maybe the drier air in pubs has been having an effect.
I feel sick about it.
Ughh! Sorry to see that!
I doubt it is an issue with your hygrometers, regardless of how accurate they are. Assuming that is the head end of the body section, it looks like the kind of crack that can occur either when you play
a flute that has just been brought in from the cold and not allowed to warm up sufficiently, or one that has not been sufficiently swabbed out after a session before being packed away. Both of these
situations are a danger when you go to sessions in winter, and especially with a new flute.
I cracked the body of a really nice antique 8-key flute in a similar location by taking it to a session in winter and not swabbing it out quickly enough, or maybe thoroughly enough.
In my case the crack did not extend all the way to the end of the tenon, so I assume that what happened is that the bore got wet due to playing, and swelled while the outside was
much drier and could not keep up with the expansion from within. In retrospect, I also think that I probably I had not taken enough time to gently play my antique flute in after I had
finished its restoration. Prior to that it had probably sat idle, unplayed, steadily dehydrating for the previous 100 years. It was fine for shorter spells of playing over the previous
weeks, but it got a much bigger dose of moisture for a more sustained period, and it couldn’t cope.
Does your crack extend to the exposed end of the tenon? Does it go all the way through to the bore (i.e., does it leak?). Anyway, don’t panic until you have heard back from the Olwells.
There may well be several alternate ways to repair this, depending on exactly what has happened, and once it is repaired properly it will function just as well as before.
Thank you Paddler. I always swab it out after playing–I’m kind of obsessive about it since the night I woke up to the sound of my upright bass cracking. It’s a solid wood bass and cost a lot of money and it had only just paid itself of with lots of local gigging. The expensive repair put it back in debt, but it earned its way out and has been solid since.
But the emotional trauma of that event (seriously I was distraught: it was an excellent bass for jazz, great sound) made me pretty obsessive about the flute. Our house is old and leaky and often cold, so it may go from 65 degrees and 60% humidity to whatever conditions prevail in a bar, and I should probably wait longer before opening the case? Or maybe use a less well sealed case?
The crack does not seem to go all the way through but in the time between when I first noticed it and when i took that picture it lengthened! I did a blow test and it seems like it;s not leaking. I’ve put it away and I’m afraid to look this morning
I hope they can fix it.
I think for the most part when blackwood Instruments crack its a change in temperature
When I played in a Pipe Band it was a big Issue. For example marching in Christmas Parades. The outside of the Blackwood Parts would be cold and the inside warm from your breath and thats when the wood could and did crack.
In regards to a Blackwood Flute you could run into this problem if you kept your House fairly cold and then you picked up the Flute and played it without warming up the Outside. I see you are in Arlington Virginia, so I don’t see ambient Humidity issues would be a big problem. I live in North Carolina and the humidty when I check from time to time was around 60.
Also play, or did play Clarinet for years. Cracks were pretty common in the Barrel as well as the left hand section. repairs for Clarinets are made with either whip stitching, or pinning using little metal pins. Both methods work pretty well.
I am not a repair Person so not sure how your Flute will be repaired, but I think once these Cracks are repaired , the Flute will be very sturdy.
Did the crack go all the way through or not? If not all the way through its called a check.
For what it’s worth, back in 1998 I had 3 new (and thankfully under warranty) Buffet clarinets crack within a year. All 3 were carefully/borderline OCD broken in (5 minutes a day for a few days, then 10 etc… swabbed out immediately, not subject to a lot of house temp fluctuation at all). Seemed to me that Buffet was using subpar grenadilla at the time, or worldwide shortages leading to less aging time… or maybe I was just upping every other buyer’s chances of not getting a prone-to-crack instrument. My experiences with the Buffet company throughout this process were really frustrating- one of the replacements they sent had such poor intonation that I returned it… only to have them send it back to me claiming it was fine and there was nothing that they would adjust or replace.
I ended up buying a handmade non-Buffet clarinet from a small maker in the interim, and when I got the 4th Buffet warranty replacement- said $#^@ it, I won’t bother breaking it in this time and if it cracks, they can replace this one too. Long story short, that one never cracked and is still the clarinet I use for teaching.
tl:dr- I’m a firm believer in breaking in instruments gradually and swabbing religiously. But sometimes the wood just has weaknesses in it that can’t really be seen before it happens, and just plain can’t handle the stresses of the normal changes in humidity/swelling that occur just from playing. I don’t know if Olwell has a replacement warranty policy for cracked instruments, but it’s worth asking.
The hygrometer isn’t a problem. The acceptable range for you flute should be 40 - 60%, so accuracy is not necessary.
I have heard of an Olwell flute cracking, a used one that went from the shop to a customer. I think it was played too much, too soon and too regularly.
If you think about it, extensive playing of a flute that has been sitting will put a lot of humidity into the bore, which will swell from the inside out. Evidence for that is that the tenons become tighter, sometimes so tight that you can’t open the joints, and you need to let it dry out for a while.
My repair Lady put wood clarinets in the refrigerator to help dry out stuck Tenons 
And yes it worked 
My repair Lady put wood clarinets in the refrigerator to help dry out stuck Tenon
I’ve put stuck clarinets in the fridge as well for short periods, but carefully wrapped in plastic bags- not to dry out the tenons, but to help cool the wood so it contracts a bit. It’s nervewracking tho- I’d suggest keeping a really careful eye on instruments in the fridge and take them out as soon as the tenons can be unstuck.
I think that is what happened to my mopane flute when new. In the head opposite the hole. I had probably a) “played too much, too soon and too regularly”. and b) been swabbing too enthusiastically and so rubbing the oil off.
I contacted the maker, followed their instructions and after it went back for extra keys at 2-years old all was found to be well.
Thank you for all the replies!
I have been playing it a lot, but also oiling it lightly and judiciously, maybe every three weeks, swabbing it always and keeping it humidified. I guess I did something wrong, but it’s hard to know what and that’s the worrisome part. I went to a session this afternoon and brought a delrin Copely, and it sounded good.
My hope is they can fix it and whatever stresses caused it to crack are relieved.
It is not necessarily true that you did something wrong. There is also a possibility that the wood contained a hidden check from the outset, and
that it only showed up during actual use because of the new (and normal) forces that that entails.
I’m sure the Olwells only use instrument grade blackwood, but the process of filtering blackwood supplies to separate out the instrument grade billets
is far from error free. There is a large scale wood supply company close to where I live, Gilmer Wood Company, and they sell all sorts of instrument grade
wood. They also sell large sacks of African Blackwood billets that have been rejected, for one reason or another, from their selection of Clarinet billets.
I’ve spent time closely examining the contents of some of those sacks, and the thing that struck me was that African Blackwood is naturally riddled with
tiny imperfections and checks.
If you get one of those reject sacks you have to sort through it with a magnifying glass and mark off the sections of billets that you plan to remove to get
rid of the imperfection, thereby ending up with a smaller billet which may be no good for a standard clarinet section, but can still work for certain flute
parts. But this is essentially the same process that someone has to go through when selecting the instrument grade wood in the first place.
What you learn from going through a process like that is that it is virtually impossible to guarantee that instrument grade billets are actually perfect.
FYI, here is a link to the bulk African Blackwood sacks from Gilmer Wood. If you get one of these sacks, each billet is marked with a chalk circle around the
defect that caused its rejection. You can see what they say about it.
https://www.gilmerwood.com/products/116188-african-blackwood-turning-squares-bag
I would not assume that you did anything wrong and from your description it looks like you were very careful. Neither would I assume that the maker did anything wrong. We are dealing with a natural material and every single piece is unique. Hidden defects and internal stresses are unpredictable and it is a common (and frustrating) experience for a crack to occur when a piece is almost finished. Also not all that unusual for the defect to not manifest itself until after delivery. I think that every maker makes allowance for a certain number of instruments to need some sort of remediation fairly early in their life and I am confident your flute will end up as good as new.
I’ll pile on and second (or third?) paddler and Dave’s remarks about flaws in the wood. This happens to me quite often, and I utilize a very wide variety of wood species for various flutes. Hidden fissures are an ever present danger, and often don’t show up to the naked eye (or even with a magnifying glass). I often encounter them when the flute is being shaped and enough material is removed to suddenly reveal the flaw. Other times I don’t know it’s there until the piece breaks apart (sometimes dramatically) on the lathe. It’s easy to imagine a flute making it all the way to the customer with a hidden crack. But in the cases where the flute doesn’t actually come to pieces, repairing these cracks is very straightforward and quite effective.
Thank you David and Geoffrey, very much
Sorry to hear about your Olwell flute cracking after four months. You seem to have done everything right as regards preventive care. I’ve often heard of Sam Murray flutes cracking, but not of an Olwell flute cracking before. I don’t think it’s your fault but rather as Dave Copley wrote, an undetected flaw in the timber. I have an Olwell Pratten made 2000, which lives in the living room in a soft roll. I never oil it, just give it a quick swab now and then, and it’s been fine. I also have Rudall flutes from the 1840’s - 1892. They live in their original boxes with a piece of damp sponge in a metal bottle top. I never oil them either. Temperature inside the room is 18-20 centigrade during the winter, -3 to -12 outside depending winter time.
The middle section of the flute will be heading to Patrick Olwell for repair tomorrow. I won’t reveal the details of a private email exchange but Mr Olwell is a gentleman
…but Mr Olwell is a gentleman. PB+J
Yes, unlike another flute maker.
Sam Murray 