An attempt at superglueing a cleaning rod to the bore of a flute.

Irish Flute
1

These last weeks about all flute time has gone towards learning to play a Rudall style flute, understanding its dynamics, and tuning one, and I will write up at some point on how that has been.

Today though, I was trying to reduce the difference between octaves of base note to zero. Already I can play it in tune, but I don’t enjoy the attention the base needs to bring it up the 25 cents or so out of tune it is when played straight. So, I found a small reduction in bore diameter here and there would close the gap to around 10 or 15 cents, which is fine for me. I eventually turned a 1cm long sleeve of wood and sanded it to under half a mm thick and fitted that to the bore, jammed in but not glued, but not expected to be moved. That had some effect, and I decided to add another in a different location lower down the flute, and for that it would have to be cut lengthwise to spring smaller while going past the existing sleeve.

Well I didn’t manage to push it past the existing sleeve, and it jammed up against it with no way to push it out because the existing sleeve was in front of it if working from base end of the flute. I tried all I could think of, sandpaper and bluetac on a dowel to drag it out, a shaped wire with a hook to catch between the sleeves, a sponge on a dowel to grab the sleeve, and so on.

So eventually I decided to try to superglue a rod to the sleeve and pull it out that way, hoping that I didn’t drip glue through the lengthwise gap which I could not tell where was, or drip glue past an end, and so glue the sleeve to the bore. Nothing stuck strong enough, the last attempt was a cleaning rod with fabric glued on and that fabric soaked in superglue, but even though stuck it would not hold hard.

Oh well, and so I decided to try to very gently hammer out both sleeves from base end with a steel rod catching any lip, which I was not sure I could do. Eventually it all moved, and out came the first sleeve… so I figured that the new sleeve had sprung open to a wider section and allowed the first sleeve past. I look down the bore and it does seem flush, well I did do a good job of sanding the sleeves down fine :wink: , and so continue trying to catch the second sleeve with a rod from base. I look again and realise the bore is actually flush. For a moment I think I have just performed a magic trick… the disappearing sleeve.

I check around me and there is just the first sleeve, then I look a couple of meters off and there is the second sleeve sat there. I have no idea at what point it came out, it could even have dropped out before being pushed down the bore… and there was no sign of glue on it at all.

So, I think I had been trying to superglue the cleaning rod to the bore of the flute, and had been trying to pull the bore of the flute itself.

Which just goes to show… uhm…

2

Heh heh, “one of those days”, eh, GreenWood?

I’m reminded of an experience when I was confronted with a clarinet LH section with a cleaning rod and a chopstick sticking out of one end, and another chopstick sticking out of the other. Apparently, the student owner was mopping the bore, when the cleaning rod jammed. Not being able to remove it, he decided to use a chopstick - one of those plastic wedge-shaped types - to push the rod out from the other end. Unfortunately, the tip of the chopstick missed the tip of the cleaning rod, bypassed it and then got itself thoroughly wedged in the bore.

Not daunted, our enterprising young player got another chopstick and attempted to push the first one out from the opposing end. Exactly the same thing happened - the chopstick missed its mark, bypassed it, and then wedged itself in thoroughly. At this point they came to me.

Nothing I could do would budge those sticks - they were really jammed in, due no doubt to the wedge-shaped profile of the sticks propelled by the rising sense of desperation of our young perpetrator. And of course, I couldn’t see anything up there, because of the cleaning rod cloth filling all remaining spaces.

I ended up boring them out in the lathe. I cut off the protruding sticks, thus burning all my bridges. It was crash or crash through from here on in! I carefully made a starting hole at the centre of one end of the mess, guided only by eye and my firm faith in the Tooth Fairy. Then set the section up in the lathe between the chuck and a rolling centre. Then gingerly introduced a long stiff drill bit, and drilled slowly, stopping often to check that it wasn’t running out to the side. Last thing I wanted to see was the tip of the drill emerging from the side of the clarinet body! It behaved beautifully, and after a while, pausing often to withdraw and clear the drill bit, it finally punched through.

But even then, I wasn’t in the clear. So densely packed were the various items, the hollow cylinder they now formed still wouldn’t move! I followed up with bigger drills, and then picked the various items out with a long scriber. Finally, the original bore emerged, unscathed. The owners were very happy!

3

That had me laughing Terry.

By now I have learned to (usually) remain calm and not get flustered, to take a methodical approach, to know when it is best I leave till later, and so on. The most difficult parts were realising that I hadn’t considered how to extract the second sleeve if it did not pass through the gap, how could I not have thought of that given it was sprung to shape (?) , and only after first trying superglue remembering of the seam and thinking of the possibility of having glued the sleeve in ?

Well that was a couple of hours in all, and all the while instead of playing how the new adjustment sounded, and now with the flute back to original and waiting for a new attempt with the sleeves. At least there weren’t any bridges to burn doing this, more like bridges to glue solid, and at most having to make new sleeves or even to rebore through those in place .

Anyway I already have the unique Pratten style flute as testimony to how much effort I can apply in as short a space of time possible :slight_smile: .

The silver lining to the story is that I had wanted to verify a slight loss of tone with the first sleeve in place, and had even prepared a kind of detailed router on a steel rod to reprofile it in place to try to get best tone - but now it is out I can reprofile mostly by hand and am able to confirm the difference in tone (more rounded, slightly less clear or detailed). Actually the main difference besides tuning was slightly more effort needed to jump octave, but it also brought out more depth in some 1st octave notes…funny how small details change so much and it is beyond me to understand exactly why some of the differences occur, for now anyway.

I like a clean bore because (so far) I think it gives the cleanest sound, and my natural style of playing on it is quite demanding on tuning because it is going on a sort of baroque sound, and that demands a near exact embouchure position for clarity of tone, so little adjustment possible to compensate for out of tune. I now think that a well in tune Rudall would suite begginers (at least if it had the sound they like) , because I had this one playing ok with medium embouchure (as in untrained) and medium pressure with that base note better in line, just using air quantity for octaves.

You probably have read this

https://www.jstor.org/stable/842003

seeing as you have much studied Rudall flutes, but for anyone else that is where they were at in the 70’s

I tried to find the flute in question, which I think is this one


https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/rudall-carte-wood-flute-antique-oxford-street

The owner maybe doesn’t know it has twenty or so (37 apparently) small holes drilled in it, refilled with epoxy ?