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Wood
To me, choosing wood is probably the most important part of the whole process. It's also a very joyous part. Over the short time I've been making flutes, I've moved from the prepared, sanitized 50x50mm red cedar lengths of timber merchants to collecting and receiving donations of wood, often straight off the tree, from all sorts of sources. I still have a very trustworthy merchant supplying imported timbers such as western red and yellow cedars, the wonderfully fragrant eastern red (pencil) cedar, rosewoods, maple and other exotics, one in Sussex supplying Port Orford cedar, alder, pear, sycamore and yew, and one in Dartmoor who has the most wonderful barns full of all the English timbers you could imagine, all air dried over many years.
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It's true that in this country we do not have the diversity of unusual woods that exists for makers in the US and Canada. We cannot easily get the likes of quilted maple or Pommele Sapele, but there are some lovely woods to work with in the UK, and I've learned that the 'difficult' woods (cross-grained, knotted, spalted etc.) usually make the most beautiful flutes and are worth the extra struggle! Oak, ash, elm, beech, birch, scots pine, yew, alder, sycamore, chestnut, hornbeam and pear all make distinctly different looking, sounding and feeling flutes, and the harder the wood to work, the more satisfying the end result. I've also found that the harder the wood, the easier it usually is to do fine detailed work on it; too many times the softness of red or yellow cedar has led to chipping or splitting at critical points such as the shaping of the fipple edge.
Much of the wood I now use, I cut 'from the round' myself and air dry using traditional methods - this can take over 18 months for some pieces. Having realised that being able to prepare and square-section my own wood was key to producing original flutes, I invested in an industrial strength bandsaw, capable of taking both very fine and heavy duty blades, and a strong circular saw. However, regardless of what cuttiing tools you have, sectioning and squaring the wood to get its best qualities shown in the right places on a flute is an art form in itself, and picking good grain patterns also comes with experience.
I usually square section wood to between 40x40mm and 60x60mm, and stop cut to a length of between 550-720mm. This depends on what key flute I want, whether it's to be 5, 6 or 7 hole, and whether it's to have tuning holes and how many. The commonest starting point is 45x45mm at 650mm for a basic middle G flute with a 3/4" (19mm) bore and 1/4" (6mm) wall thickness.
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| Working beech out of the round |
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Related sections:
• Cutting and routing the blank
• Fipples, voice boxes and flues
• Glueing and shaping
• Tuning
• Finishing
Click on images to enlarge them in a new pop-up window.
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| Cedars and oaks sectioned and ready to split |
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Timber merchants in the UK are getting fewer. If you are going for imported timber, please be careful about choosing your wood, particularly with regard to the sustainablity or otherwise of its origins. Also, be wary of ready-sized, kiln-dried imported cedars; in my experience they have often been rushed into shipment and are still 'wet' inside.
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The Owlhouse • Milford • Surrey • UK • dc@secondvoiceflutes.co.uk
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© Second Voice Flutes 2005 |
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