This is embarassing but I must admit I’m really a newbie to flutes. I finally purchased an M&E Polymer. After assembling it and tried to blow air into it. I couldn’t get notes to play. No matter what I did I couldn’t get anything to sound decent.
So I disassembled the flute and looked around the holes, I thought maybe there’s something clogging it up. Lo and behold I found like a cork or wood plug in the headjoint. I then blamed this thing for impeding the sound.
Since I got my burkes the same day, I poked the cork plug or tuning cork(I finally found the right term after searching around google) with my burke high d. It wouldn’t budge out.
Maybe I need to soak this in hot water or put some oil or grease it out. I got my things ready and it hit me, maybe I need to research more.
I looked around google and couldn’t get any information for about 25 minutes. I was ready to give up searching and start removing the plug until I found Doug Tipple’s flute site - http://dougsflutes.googlepages.com/flutebuyer’sguide
Ideas about tunable flutes: In reading through the various auction pages on ebay you will find that there is some discrepancy about what is meant by the term “tunable flute”. Here is my take on the topic. All Irish flutes need to have one of the ends stopped, and this is traditionally done with a cork plug called a tuning cork. Cork is an especially good material for this because it is compressible. After the flute is made the maker adjusts the cork so that the flute is in tune with itself (intonation). The cork position is usually set at about ½” to ¾” from the edge of the blow hole or embouchure.
LOL! Luckily, I had second thoughts of doing it because I was ready to remove the plug…
I then started to blow, after a few minutes of blowing, I can now get a sound off the 1st octave. HOORAY! that was encouraging.
Welcome!
Yes, you want to leave the cork where it is. It should be about 19mm up the flute from the center of the blow hole. Chances are, it is in the right place.
Keep at it, you will get the hang of it.
so you now know the anatomy of the flute huh? good thing you left the cork in place and if you got sound after just a few minutes you are doing fine…keep going the next few years and surprise yourself
its worth the struggle!
You’re not planning to get a full-set of Uilleann-pipes or a Grand Piano or anything anytime soon are you?
I can fully appreciate the learning by doing style, as I’m very much into that myself, but I think it’s a good idea to at least do some basic research about the instrument you’re trying.
If you would have read anything directed at newbies before, you would have known that getting a sound usually takes a good while for most people, as well as having some sort of idea of the anathomy of a flute.
Anyway, keep blowing. Getting a tone doesn’t usually take too long. Developing a good embouchure however is likely to take years. Even when you think you’ve got it, you’re not even half way there, believe me.
It’s one of the most demanding instruments in excistance, but it’s equally rewarding when it starts to pay of.
Once had the reverse problem…Doug had sent me an unfinished prototype in “A”…played nicely enough but the d%#& thing wanted to play in Bb…struggled w/ the blasted thing for over an hour before I noticed no cork !!!
EDIT: Yup…dug it out and it still plays w/o a cork ! Got to try this w/ the M&E when I get back home…
Welcome to the flute forum, Piratedog. It pleases me that what I wrote about tuning corks has found an interested reader several years after I wrote it. At the time that I wrote that passage I had a competitor on ebay who has making pvc flutes similar to mine. On his website he went on and on about how his flutes were so superior. His one claim to fame was that his one-piece flutes were tunable, in that you were able to move the tuning cork. In my article I was trying to indicate that being able to move the tuning cork does not make the flute a tunable flute. The only way to make the flute fully tunable is to have a way to change the length of the flute, usually using a separate adjustable headjoint. I tried to make a distinction between tuning the flute (changing the basic pitch of the flute) and adjusting the intonation, which is what you do when you adjust the postion of the tuning cork.
Luckily, I had second thoughts of doing it because I was ready to remove the plug…
good thing you left the cork in place and if you got sound after just a few minutes you are doing fine…keep going the next few years and surprise yourself 
