After mentioning this flute in a previous post, I decided it need a new post.
Not long ago I was planning to sell my Olwell keyless blackwood Pratten. In the 20+ years I owned it I’d never quite warmed up to it --it was never comfortable to my hands and I wasn’t particularly fond of the tone, so I mainly kept it as a backup flute, although I still played it fairly often. But then a couple months ago when I had to play flute for a funeral service, I decided at the last minute to use the Olwell and it performed wonderfully and sounded far better than it ever had before --and has consistently sounded good and played nicely ever since. So I think I’ll hold on to a while longer. I prefer to think it took 20+ years for the flute to break in rather than 20 years for me to break in to it.
Anyone else ever had that experience?
If anything I’m the complete opposite - it’s either love at first sight / blow / squeeze or nothing. I’ve recently switched piccolo and even though I’m taking a while to settle down on the slightly different embouchure, I know it (a Peter Worrell 6 key Basel- style) is an absolute keeper. Whereas if I don’t bond with an instrument fairly instantly it just never subsequently makes the cut.
Twenty years is indeed an impressive amount of time to keep an instrument you’re not happy with, let alone then take it out on a gig and find you’ve changed your mind 
Yes, I am surprised I didn’t sell that flute many years ago, but each time I started to something gave me second thoughts at the last minute. There were brief moments during which I got hints of it’s potential, so perhaps that kept lurking around in my subconscious and preventing me from selling it.