Hi all,
I know how you just can’t wait for the next eBay flute restorations, so here goes:
This is a later model General William Hall flute, 8 key Cocuswood. I replaced the ivory head insert with the faux stuff, so as not to upset Jim.
Here is how it looked when I got it:
It cleaned up nice!
This is a detail of the interesting cork damper, coming out of the G# block:
There was even a cork damper for the Eb key! I always wondered how the line up should be with the foot keys…
another intereting point, is the pointy key touches, on the Eb, G# and the short F.
Here is Doug’s William Hall that I finished yesterday, as a comparison:
Before:
After:
Well enough for one day…
Oh ya, they both play great!
The head is in 3 pieces, so I remove the liner, (that was fun…) cut a new center piece out of replacement Ivory, sandwich it all back together with epoxy, on the sleeve, and presto! I had to line up the new Emb. hole to the existing hole in the sleeve, but actually it was easy. It is usually pretty hard to get the sections off the liner, as they fight each other. All the lip plates that are continuous, are cut above at the top of the lip plate.
Jon, can you clarify this please? I have an anonymous English eBay flute I got recently with a badly cracked head both sides of a complete sleeve type metal lip-plate. I was wondering how they mounted that kind of lip-plate originally and therefore how one would take such apart. I had worked out that the full circumference lip-plate could neither have been heated and shrunk into place over a single timber tube, nor its seam soldered in situ without burning the wood, so I’m guessing the wood of the head is in two sections (with turned recesses for the thickness of the metal lip-plate sleeve) joining under the lip plate but not at the embouchure? Have you had any such apart? Presumably one removes the liner and then separates the two sections of timber to withdraw them from the lip-plate sleeve? (The barrel is also cracked and the slide seized, so I’m going to be having fun with this one!)
Yes, it was turned from Cocuswood, it matches better then the photo makes it look. It kind of fits the flute as every piece of wood on it is from a different tree! Lots of nice knots in it also…
Just north of the lip plate is the seam, the lower section has the emb. hole.
I guess they could use smaller pieces of wood with these heads. The Hall has 3 pieces, which makes the wood pieces even smaller. So, when you remove the sleeve, as you heat it up the lip plate and the sections will separate. The problem is when one of the sections doesn’t want to come off! There is a lot of pressure, under the lip plate, due to the shrunken wood underneath.
