Chiff and Fipple Forums

I remember fiddle player Johnny Henry telling me that when anyone came home from the States with some of Michael Coleman's records the local musicians would journey miles by foot, bicycle or donkey & cart to listen to them. Even if Coleman's records were played on the radio many of the rural mus...

I have a Dave Williams flute, 3 piece blackwood, unlined headjoint, short footjoint, 4 silver keys. I bought it at auction in 2019. The previous owner bought it new in the 80s, I believe, from Hobgoblin in Crawley, Sussex. I have a price list from Dave, Sept 1979 : Standard flute w nickel silver or ...

Alternatively, ask Haswells to send the ivory finial separately in an envelope. The customs may well miss it & nothing is lost if they don't.

I like them both. The black & green work very well.

One possibly useful feature; each flute must look totally unique. If it was stolen & you saw it in a pawn shop or posted on eBay you'd recognise it immediately & be able to provide photographic proof it was yours.

I had an email from the auctioneer last week confirming the 6175 serial number.

It seems that Maurice had many diverse interests including archaeology and his archaeological artifacts will be coming up for auction at Gardiner & Houlgate in a couple of weeks. The repair to the R&R by Michael Wright in 1969 was no doubt the long F block replacement. The cracks & short...

I went to the G&H auction and bid for the Rudall & Rose but I dropped out long before the final bid. I made the mistake of taking my wife who doesn't share my enthusiasm for flutes. R&R 4417 was part of a collection of many musical instruments in the estate of Maurice Byrne F.S.A who die...

Well done Markus. There's a lot of interesting reading. Though I had a bit of trouble with your link. The link below should go straight to the pdf file.

http://portal.research.lu.se/portal/fil ... Timbre.pdf

In the pictures GH sent me you can clearly see the cracks and the state of the keys. The long F block has been glued & doesn't look particularly well done to me. Also GH forgot to mention that there's a piece missing out of the short F block & the pin is exposed. Unfortunately there's not en...

I queried the condition of the R&R with Gardiner Houlgate & received the following reply. It's an interesting spelling of Tavistock. I presume it is the auctioneer's misreading. Lot Number: 907 There will be no VAT on sale hammer price. Description Eight-keyed rosewood flute by Rudall & ...

"The Keymaster" is an excellent film but I always thought that some wonderful footage must have been left on the editing room floor. Now we have a chance to see some of it - brilliant!

Do most flute makers actually go to the trouble of heat treating their metal tubing ? And is it actually desireable ? I'd have thought it better to have the metal section inside the headjoint as soft and malleable as possible to reduce resistance against shrinkage of the wood. Plastic deformation in...

Like Dave I've had to dig out my old college books on stresses in compound tubes (from the 60s so probably even older than his) though they never seem to consider wood as the outer material. I agree with Dave that there are different mechanisms at play here. I did some calcs based on thermal expansi...

I have had a couple of flutes for years (one an old nach Meyer, the other an unknown modern cheap one) and never been able to get much out of them. I'd been looking for a decent flute for ages. Someone recently brought a Millyard flute to our session, I'd never heard of Millyard flutes, and it looke...