ernestmurphy wrote:
He was making his Andean winds with painstakingly hand-carved notches, unusual in a time when most people use rat-tail files for expediency.
I was interested in this comment, being a flute maker myself (and I make quena among many other types of flutes). I was wondering what the virtue (or even the difference) was between hand-carved notches and those made with a file? When you speak of hand-carving the notch, do you mean that he does it with a carving knife or x-acto knife? And does he omit the use of files altogether? That seems surprising to me. With most embouchure cuts of all kinds, be they notches, blades, ellipses (for transverse flutes) etc., they are commonly finished with
some type of file (in my case I favor various grits of sandpaper wrapped around a thin metal cylinder in lieu of a file). Completing the proper bevels, undercuts, etc. and doing it smoothly usually ends up requiring something like this. I can't envision carving the notch and not using some type of filing/sanding method to finish it cleanly.
And speaking as someone who has cut a lot of notches in my career, I don't tend to think of any type of file as being very expedient, simply because it takes skill and practice (and elbow grease). To be fair, filing might be expedient compared to carving the notch with a knife, so you might have a point
