Hi fluters,
so I know a few nach Meyer flutes here in my surroundings, some in blackwood, one in boxwood. They all have slides and pristine barrels, no cracks, nowhere. Also, I hardly ever saw a Nach on ebay that had a cracked barrel, and there are quite some.
Is it like that? Do they crack less often? If so, why? Or am I seeing something that doesn’t exist?
Cheers,
G.
I’ve done several nach Meyer barrel cracks, Gabriel - and heads. From their construction they should be just as prone to such cracking as English, French or any other flutes with lined or part-lined sections. A swift perusal of my “in-box” shows roughly half of the German flutes (some named, others not, all off eBay!) there - about 10 - have barrel cracks.
Okay, then the ones I know are just lucky - or the cracked ones are homesick. Who knows.
German engineering eh? Vorsprung durch Technik 
Prussian, surley?
very surley those Prussians
Not Prussian. Most of the woodwind industry was in southern Germany, around Markneukirchen, and also in Austria and Bohemia.
A surly Prussian? Surely not!
Funny you should mention the connection between lining and cracking. I have a friend, proper craftsman and instrument maker (not woodwind) who thinks that when wood shrinks, the hole down the middle will get bigger, because the wood “shrinks away” from it. He thinks I am stupid, or obstinate, or both because it still seems obvious to me that when the wood shrinks, the hole will get smaller - or at least try to, hence the crack.
It isn’t necessarily that the bore diameter shrinks uniformly, or the total volume of the bore, though that may happen; rather it may be that the wood is trying to go oval (when originally turned cylindrical) because of the lay of the grain. Most baulks of timber used for woodwind (or anything else) will have more-or-less horizontal grain running across them laterally (as well as longitudinally), which means that, with a hole bored through the middle, N & S walls may have relatively long grain sections laterally while E & W walls have very short - and with time that will affect how the wood tries to behave, creating uneven stresses. I’m pretty sure Terry McGee has some stuff about all this on his website somewhere… Another aspect is that one might assume that a metal tube, being far more reactive to heat than wood, might expand too quickly for the wood and cause a crack that way - but apparently such a supposition would also be a fallacy.
In the many cracked heads and barrels, the wood is usually universally shrunk up to 1mm in diameter. I have seen this in some modern makers flutes, especially those made in wet climates, like Ireland, where the wood has not had a chance to really season. Of course the metal is a constant, so CRACK! The wood will resist for a number of years, especially if it has stayed in the wet climate. I have also found that the scoring of the outside of the sleeve, that causes nice sharp raised ridges, that prevented the sleeve form spinning, if the shellac glue failed, caused the flute to crack along this raised edge.
It might take a 150 years but it will crack, it is just a ticking time bomb. But don’t loose sleep over it! 