Thanks. Helpful. I expect that medium to small holed Rudalls aren’t going to have
the power of a Pratten. Such are Rudalls.. I’ve gone kind of rudally, and I’m hoping
that a strong embouchure can make a big difference. So the Somers is interesting.
Am still playing with the idea. Actually what intrigues me more is the idea of acrylic impregnation and am about to try this with some fairly light weight Kauri wood. Michael Hubbert sent me some pictures of a full set of Uilleann Pipes made from Western Bigleaf Maple, but acrylic impregnated. Impressive. The process renders the wood stable, nonporous, with a mass similar to blackwood. Apparently it also much improves its turning properties.
This would open up the wood resources to locally derived species. No need for import. No need for CITES stuff. Speaking of which I just got my permit today. An added wrinkle in the process is that one has to have the blackwood items inspected and the individual export permits stamped by a FWS or USDA inspector before these can be sent. Which for me means a ferry ride over to Seattle, which can use a whole day and costs minimally $35 in the summer. For my friend Murray in Southern Oregon, it means driving 5 - 6 hours up to Portland and 5 - 6 hours back. Hopefully after these initial inspections they’ll grant waivers and simply pre-stamp the permits. Or not. But eventually I might tire of this and only export flutes in Boxwood and Mopane and potentially other non-CITES species. Or Delrin even. One of the reasons why I am actually looking into it some.
Casey
Maple is the champion of resin absorbing woods, at least of all the types I’ve tried. I’ve done maple, cherry, black walnut, douglas fir, curly redwood, redwood burl, bubinga, African blackwood, osage orange, verawood, cocobolo, hawthorne, dogwood, ironwood, western red cedar, mountain mahogany, bocote, and probably some others I’m forgetting. All of the oily hardwoods were done simply as experiments since it was obvious from the get-go that they didn’t absorb any resin. Any extra stability that resulted came simply from being vacuumed down and then baked at 220 degrees for about five hours 
And the flip side to that is that the process can actually damage perfectly sound timbers as often as it stabilizes them. I had some very treasured pieces of wood come out full of cracks they didn’t have previously, which taught me a painful lesson about the risks of vacuum chambers on certain types of wood.
In terms of resin absorption, maple, curly redwood and (surprisingly) curly douglas fir actually absorbed the most resin. Maple is the champion because it is already quite hard on its own (and I’m using hard maple instead of soft) but then it also takes on a load of resin and by the time it cures in the oven it comes out as heavy as blackwood as well as being hard. I’m actually launching my new line of Pratten flutes making them entirely out of resin stabilized maple that I’ve dyed. It looks like old, stained boxwood, and by the time I add the silver rings it makes for a gorgeous flute and it performs every bit as well as the most dense tropical timbers. And it also eliminates the issue of wood mobility and the long process of drying and stabilizing wood a bit at a time by working it and resting it, etc..
Looking into the future and facing all the paper work associated with exporting CITIES protected timbers I just decided not to bother. Even as recently as a week ago I was thinking about getting the master permit because I’ve got a few hundred pieces of blackwood, but then I just said to hell with it. I’d rather focus on developing these alternatives and just limit my sales of blackwood flutes to the domestic U.S.
So I see Delrin as a great option for many of the experienced makers who have only used blackwood in the past. I think the ITM community is ahead of the curve in its acceptance of it as a material as well, which is an advantage. Delrin is (IMO) every bit as good as blackwood in terms of sound and it has a host of other advantages as well. And when you sand it properly it looks like blackwood! The only thing I don’t like about it is reaming it. It can behave differently than wood and on a couple of occasions I got a section stuck on my reamer! It expands and contracts when being worked, and I was reaming a long section of a Pratten body and it got on the reamer and wouldn’t come off. I think the heat made it contract and then it just seized up and I’m hanging on the thing and heaving with all my might. The reamer was turning but it couldn’t be backed out. Nothing. I had to use a winch to pull it off the reamer–it was a bit of a farce actually, but I needed to get it off without harming my reamer. So beware of reaming long sections…
I’d probably only use it on short sections and would have reamers dedicated for it, and maybe have the bores roughed out at a local CNC shop to spare my reamers!
Geoffrey, where do you purchase it? Do you get solid or in tube form?
Having the bores roughed out would be a great option. Even step boring the sections helps if you have a variety of gun drill sizes.
I get mine at McMaster-Carr. I use both solid rod stock and tubes for different applications. If you look at the specs for the Delrin tubing you’ll see that you have limited choices in terms of the O.D. and I.D. of the stock and can choose accordingly.
Boring Delrin requires patience and slower spindle speeds. If it gets hot during the boring or reaming process, it melts and then you have a mess (and have to chuck the piece). So you go a bit slower, but its not a big deal. And a 12" section of 1.5" diameter Delrin rod is about $10. More expensive than many woods, but less than others. Plus you never have to bother with grain matching!
That is about what I pay for blackwood if I am lucky!
Exactly! That’s why I’ve always rolled my eyes a bit when players expect the Delrin flutes to be cheaper based upon the material. It is very high quality, super dense and machines like butter. Not an ordinary plastic at all.
I’ve owned and tried a number of Delrin and other plastic flutes including: Seery, Older M&E, Tipple, Dixon, Copley, Somers and Ward. I’m at best an intermediate flute player, so take this for what it is worth, and most prefer my granadilla 6-key Wm. Hall and Sons. I currently still own both the Somers small hole Rudall and the Ward Delrin flutes. While they play quite differently (as I believe the Ward is based on a Hawkes design, which has profile and holes closer to a Pratten, with the 4-piece body of a Rudall - best of both worlds…), I would say that either has more than sufficient volume for the type of small session the OP is interested in. I think the big difference between the two has more to do with embouchure cut and tone hole position than anything else. Takes me a bit to get the most out of either on switching between the two, but both are very good instruments.
As an aside, I also have a blackwood Ward, designed to the same pattern as the Delrin one, and I do like it better than the Delrin. Possibly a slight difference in the cut of the embouchure, or slightly better fitting joints. Hard to say, but I get the impression that it has a more complex sound with more interesting overtones.
He’s got another, perhaps even better article (‘better’ because it’s not so directly trying to sell something) at http://www.ridenourclarinetproducts.com/what-aristotle-knew.html. If you can get through the first few paragraphs about Aristotle, what he’s saying is that the most important question’s not ‘what’s it made of?’, ‘who makes it?’ or even ‘what does it sound like?’, but something more like a vast expansion of ‘how does it play?’ (he says ‘how does it phrase?’, but the intent is the same). And the lesson is equally applicable to flutes (or any other musical instruments) as clarinets. For sure, the first three questions are likely to contribute to the fourth, but that’s the important one.
Just like I ultimately prefer my wood Copley to my Delrin one, and believe the (not quite identical) embouchure to give me just that little bit more. But perhaps we also prefer our wood flutes because we want to prefer them and find we can get that little bit more out of them because of that? On which note, how fortunate that ultimately preferring even the ‘every day’ qualities of my beautiful, unique, wood four-key to the almost equally good Delrin keyless Dave made me to help us develop it has the flutes the ‘right way round’!
I have owned (M&E R&R PVC and ebonite, Seery, Walt Sweet Shannon, and Baubet) or played for a goodly amount of time (Copley) quite a few delrin flutes. Unlike Loren, I’m just lazy and I don’t swab them out…just shake them out and never had a mold issue. I still do need to try a Summers and a Forbes, because I’ve heard good things about them.
Anyway, the only one I still own is my Baubet 5 key. The flute simply fits me well. I suspect a wooden Baubet would work for me as well. Love the look, weight, block mounted keys, etc, plus Francois is a great guy and his flute, not based on a specific historical instrument, is a design that works well for me.
Thoughts on the others:
Seery - if you like a Pratten based flute, they tend to be good (owned one, played 3). I have a great CD by a bunch of good players all playing Seery flutes…they sound great.
Copley - quite good.
M&E - best bang for your buck if you want keys, heavy, industrial design and the wide body profile was hard on my hands with time.
Walt Sweet Shannon - best bang for your buck, period. If I wanted a pure keyless travel flute…this would be it. I missed keys and at the time I was playing with a box player who was slightly out of tune so I missed a real tuning slide.
Anyway, I’ve always stated I’m in the camp that says the material matters much less than design and execution of said design.
I don’t think I’ve posted much in ages…hi everyone!
Eric
Just like I ultimately prefer my wood Copley to my Delrin one, and believe the (not quite identical) embouchure to give me just that little bit more. But perhaps we also prefer our wood flutes because we > want > to prefer them and find we can get that little bit more out of them because of that? On which note, how fortunate that ultimately preferring even the ‘every day’ qualities of my beautiful, unique, wood four-key to the almost equally good Delrin keyless Dave made me to help us develop it has the flutes the ‘right way round’!
I don’t know how many players on this forum are familiar with RonKorb but while not being an ITM oriented flute player, he is a serious virtuoso and master of many world flutes in addition to the Boehm flute. He has worked with me field testing my Boehm head joints and at one point he made an amusing observation about flute players. He said that when making a flute for any player you can’t underrate what he calls the “Ego-effect”. He said that when a player gets a certain type of feedback from an instrument, even if it is not audible to others but which makes them feel that they sound good and are playing well, they love it. He described the experience of having a wooden head joint that just really resonated and felt alive and made him think, “Wow! I sound amazing!” and that in thinking that it actually stimulated him to play better. It’s an experience independent of any impression the instrument makes on the listener–it’s just for the player, which is why he calls it the Ego-effect. But it points up the importance of what we believe about an instrument or the material it is made of. A material may not be measurably superior, but if we love it and it inspires us, then clearly it is good.
There is another expression, too. A flute may sound a particular way
‘under the ear’ of the flooter, it may have an especially interesting and
nuanced sound, which is largely lost on the wider audience. So Ralph Sweet
once told me his blackwood flutes may have a different sound ‘under the ear’ of the
musician, while the audience may not be able to hear the difference if he plays
a rosewood duplicate. I confess I’ve never much liked what I take to be
the distinctive sound of delrin (or at least what I think is the distinctive sound),
but it also occurs to me that this effect (if it is real) may be entirely ‘under my ear.’
I’m picking up sounds that are mostly discernible close up.
I note in passing that several messages in this thread remark that the musician does
somewhat prefer the sound of his wooden duplicate, and attributes the difference to perhaps
a slightly better cut embouchure hole. But this does at least suggest the possibility
that the material is making a difference, THOUGH not necessarily one others notice. FWIW.
This is exactly what I’m driving at! My custom four-key (the ‘flute for nine fingers’) went through a painstaking process of consultation/development between player and maker as well as a late switch to Solomon blackwood when Dave’s suggestion of this still-unusual, but beautiful, hard and dense, alternative managed to tempt me from my previously stated preference for Delrin. Then some further opportunistic, but important, refinement in a ‘mark II’ body we’d not expected to be making. So it’s no wonder (as well as something of a relief) that this uniquely personal flute is my favourite and most cherished of all my instruments for the thought that went into it, the way it plays, the way it looks, the way it fits and the way I continue to grow into it. I’d probably feel the same had we gone for the more utilitarian Delrin, but we didn’t!
Actually, Jim, I’ve been careful (as one of those to whom you refer) not to say better cut. Just not identical. They’re both elliptical and look equally well cut, but the wood one is if anything almost infinitesimally bigger and not quite so perfectly symmetrical… just the kind of differences you’re going to get through hand finishing, testing for sound and knowing when to leave well alone. And I love it, but am also ultimately more familiar with it through playing it more!
Well, for those of you who are wondering whether wood or delrin differ widely, I’ve a couple of flutes on my desk for oiling. I had a video going—Sé mo Loach on TG4—while I was working and just noticed I have carefully oiled my delrin Baubet. 
Best wishes.
Steve
Well, hopefully it won’t crack now! 
Needs appropriate humidification (not oiling) for that! 
Uh oh…Umm Steve, have you seen the movie Gremlins?
But it sounds so much better now…
Best wishes.
Oily Steve
Desi Seery always recommending oiling his Delrin flutes.
OK, so now I’m ahead of the curve… I retract my
Did Mr. Seery give a reason for oiling delrin?
Best wishes.
Steve