After some conversations with Travis King (tkingflutes.ca) I have arranged to purchase one of his Mopane 5-piece flutes within my price range. I’ve seen pictures and videos of the flute, and it looks like a beautiful instrument. It is currently at the mercy of the Canadian postal system, but if all goes as planned, I should have it by the middle of next week.
I really appreciate the interest and suggestions here on the forum. I will post more after I have had a chance to play and evaluate the flute.
I received a lovely five-piece mopane flute from Travis King in Victoria BC today. (In the middle of a snowstorm) It has a rich, dark tone and speaks well across the range. It is a beautiful instrument, and feels substantial in my hands. It has six silver rings, and the head joint is fully lined. It will take me a few days/weeks to become used to the instrument, but I am pleased with my initial impressions.
Thanks to all who offered suggestions and encouragement. I will offer more feedback as I have more experience with the instrument.
It’s also worth checking secondhand stores, pawn shops, antique dealers and the like. I recently picked up a Sweetheart flute in excellent condition for about $60 at an antique shop.
The guy kept trying to talk it up by claiming the rings were Bakelite
About Sweetheart flutes, that’s what I started on back in the 1970s, his rosewood with the imitation ivory rings. The rosewood he was using was beautiful, a deep brown with red streaks, which with playing and oiling got darker over the years eventually looking almost like African Blackwood.
Back in the 1980s when I was teaching flute workshops at festivals a booth would always be there which sold Ralph Sweet flutes. I had an agreement with the seller where I would take a handful to my flute workshops and allow people who wanted to try an Irish flute to use them. After each workshop the booth would get a half-dozen people buying the flutes they’d borrowed. He sold a lot of those!
In playing through large numbers of Rosewood and Maple ones I found that the Maple ones consistently played better (a bigger richer tone). Measuring the bore in the top of the body section revealed that the Maple ones had slightly bigger bores than the Rosewood ones.
About flutes made after Ralph’s passing I know nothing.
I’ve been making flutes in a lot of different stabilized woods recently, with the stabilization done using vacuum-based resin infusion. I’ve noticed that when you ream different woods using the exact same reamer, inserted to the exact same point, the bore ends up fractionally larger in the softer woods than the harder ones. And I suppose this isn’t that surprising when you think about how the reamer works.
When you play the flutes you can hear the difference. It is subtle, but it is definitely there. It is tempting to conclude that one kind of wood sounds different to another, and in a sense (indirectly) it does, but the difference is probably more to do with the bore geometry than the material. But then, the bore geometry depends, in part, on the material, practically speaking, because makers don’t tend to have separate sets of reamers for the same model of flute in different materials.
I’ve told the story about how many years ago at the annual National Flute Society convention who should I see but Ralph Sweet manning a booth! Being on the other side of the country our interactions had only been through snail-mail (no internet then).
I asked him “why do your Maple flutes have bigger bores than your Rosewood ones?”
“No they all have the same bores.”
Since he had a dozen of each kind laying on the table I took the headjoint off one of each and did the stick-a-finger-down-the-bore thing, showing that my finger could go deeper in the Maple flute.
He was puzzled. “I use the same reamer.”
Then he said “I know! The Maple is softer and more material is removed.”
As an old Irish fluter told me years ago “the bigger the bore the better the flute”.
My observations during reaming were that the softer woods flex and compress dimensionally more than the harder woods, particularly when using a spade or spoon type reamer, which causes a certain amount of transient ovaling during reaming. The way to minimize this is to make circular reamers with multiple cutting/scraping edges which more equally distribute the outward force around the bore.
I also think the softer woods can tend to more of a “fiber pulling” ream as opposed to a clean cutting of the wood fibers you get with the hardest woods.
We used spoon reamers for rough reaming, circular multi-flute reamers for “finish” reaming, then coated the bores with a layer of epoxy and re-reamed a final time. This combination of steps insured that, in the end, every bore, regardless of wood type, had the exact same dimensions.
I agree about being able to hear differences in bore dimensions. We got instruments back into the shop for servicing that had been made, 1, 2, or even 3 decades prior and these would get play tested and then often re-reamed with the original reamers. You could definitely hear the difference after re-reaming, particularly when a significant amount of wood/epoxy came off during the re-reaming due to shrinkage over the years. This proved to me that measuring historical instruments today doesn’t accurately tell us what the original dimensions were, and consequently we don’t know how much better they may have played/sounded when new.
