Chiff and Fipple Forums

William Bryant wrote:

Geoffrey Ellis wrote:As I may have mentioned earlier in this thread, my method is a bit dangerous and I'm looking for an alternative after that happened to me. I got tangled in it, had some of my clothing involved and was using all my strength to keep from being battered by the thing while I groped for the power switch! But for short sections of flute with a nice, sharp reamer I bet your holder will do the job, and save your sinews!

I'm glad you're OK. Sounds painful, and terrifying. When I was in band instrument repair school back in the early 90s I took a couple of machine shop courses taught by a fellow who had seen enough mishaps (he had worked in the tool shop on a Navy vessel) to think it valuable to show us films and photos of what can go wrong around power tools--hair caught in a big drill press (it was a guy with a huge "afro"; you can imagine the rest), long sleeve caught in a big lathe chuck (took the poor man in all the way to the waste; wrapped everything above his belt around the work and spun it several hundred times before a co-worker could hit the off button. Gruesome beyond description.)

It is impossible to pay too much attention when operating machines!

Amen. Never becoming complacent around familiar tools is the key. Daily exposure can reduce the sense of danger (just think of how comfortable we are in automobiles, and they are hellishly dangerous things).

Geoffrey Ellis wrote:Never becoming complacent around familiar tools is the key.

Complacency with procedures is equally bad.

Dan A. wrote:

Geoffrey Ellis wrote:Never becoming complacent around familiar tools is the key.

Complacency with procedures is equally bad.

Hmmm...not sure I get the distinction. Can you elaborate? For me, the tools and the procedures in using them are one and the same in practice. The tool is not a danger unless used to engage in a procedure.

Geoffrey Ellis wrote:Never becoming complacent around familiar tools is the key. Daily exposure can reduce the sense of danger

Indeed. I have a friend who used to make good money changing light bulbs on radio towers in Alaska. Really good money. One day, three hundred feet up a tower in a twenty below zero gale, he realized he wasn't scared anymore. He quit the next day.

Geoffrey Ellis wrote:Hmmm...not sure I get the distinction. Can you elaborate?

One good example is: "I've looked back there 1,000 times and never found anything wrong." But on the 1,001st time, something was wrong. Sometimes we get so used to doing something a certain way that we think we could do it in our sleep. This can also cause someone to miss a critical recent revision to procedure or overlook a step after returning from a break. Granted, these aren't terribly pertinent to flutemaking, but complacency is never a good thing. William's friend who climbed radio towers was probably wise to quit when he realized he was no longer scared; at that point, complacency could have kicked in at any time.

In these cases, we might not need to carry tools, but we still use valuable tools: our eyes, ears, hands, brains, and knowledge bases.

Dan A. wrote:

Geoffrey Ellis wrote:Hmmm...not sure I get the distinction. Can you elaborate?

One good example is: "I've looked back there 1,000 times and never found anything wrong." But on the 1,001st time, something was wrong. Sometimes we get so used to doing something a certain way that we think we could do it in our sleep. This can also cause someone to miss a critical recent revision to procedure or overlook a step after returning from a break. Granted, these aren't terribly pertinent to flutemaking, but complacency is never a good thing. William's friend who climbed radio towers was probably wise to quit when he realized he was no longer scared; at that point, complacency could have kicked in at any time.

In these cases, we might not need to carry tools, but we still use valuable tools: our eyes, ears, hands, brains, and knowledge bases.

Okay, I'm with you now

[Thread revival. - Mod]

I found this page particularly helpful in thinking about my own reamer-making saga (admittedly, still in the planning stages):

https://www.labellenote.fr/en/lutherie/ ... sconiques/

Along with some clear photos of the process of making 3/4 reamers, I also love his method of supporting the reamer blank by using movable steady rests along a rail. This setup would seem to allow the rests to be reused for making reamers of different lengths/tapers, and also allows for milling long reamers by repositioning the whole rail setup on the moveable bed of a milling machine.

I plan on making some 3/4 reamers from Stressproof stock in the near-ish future. If it works out, I will post pictures.

Oh, and I've also had excellent results using ground-down paddle bits to step-drill the bore prior to reaming, as suggested by several makers in this thread (also in 1mm increments or so). This seems to massively extend the life of the reamer (and number of times the reamer needs to be sharpened). It doesn't take much extra time, and given the annoyance of making/buying reamers, seems to be worth the hassle. It also seems logical that this method reduces stress on the billet being reamed, which is particularly nice when the billet is small.

Unrepentant Banjoist wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 2:02 pm [Thread revival. - Mod]
Oh, and I've also had excellent results using ground-down paddle bits to step-drill the bore prior to reaming, as suggested by several makers in this thread (also in 1mm increments or so). This seems to massively extend the life of the reamer (and number of times the reamer needs to be sharpened). It doesn't take much extra time, and given the annoyance of making/buying reamers, seems to be worth the hassle. It also seems logical that this method reduces stress on the billet being reamed, which is particularly nice when the billet is small.

The challenge/danger with step drilling is how to ensure concentricity for each stage of the step drilling process. If not managed very carefully, it is easy to remove material outside of the cone that you ultimately want to create, at which point your billet is ruined. Simply restricting insertion depth does not insure against this when there is a possibility that the center of the new section being drilled is not perfectly aligned with that of the adjacent section (or existing pilot hole). The danger of making a mistake increases with the number of steps drilled and the closeness with which you try to approximate the desired bore, and even with a small number of drilled steps the tolerances for misalignment get very small compared to the normal variation in alignment (unless carefully controlled using pilot guides, etc). But, of course, if what you care most about is saving wear on your reamer, you tend to push for more steps and closer approximation to the cone. For these reasons I've ended up doing only minimal step drilling before switching to a roughing reamer prior to using my finish reamers. The roughing reamer (which can be bought relatively inexpensively online) is what saves much of the wear on my finish reamers. It takes longer to rough ream than drill, but switching out drill bits (or billets in batch work) has high enough overhead that rough reaming seems to be just as fast overall for my kind of work and workshop setup.

I just thought I should draw your attention to that in case you have been enjoying an easy time reaming billets that have been step drilled outside the boundaries of your reamed cone. You can only know that this has not happened by conducting a detailed profile of the bore you create each time ... which is very time consuming, and requires some special tools.