Dry Time of the Year - Avoid the Crack

[cocusflute]

In this dry time of the year we should each have a digital hygrometer and keep our flutes in a moisture controlled environment.
You can do an eBay search for "digital hygrometer" and buy one for less than $15 shipped to you.
I like to keep my flutes in a large drawer with a cup of water and a wet rag to act as a wick. I keep the relative humidity between 40% - 60%.
The drawer is not air-tight, and this minimizes the growth of mildew or mold.
Craic, not crack.

[Doug_Tipple]

In this dry time of the year we should each have a digital hygrometer and keep our flutes in a moisture controlled environment.
You can do an eBay search for "digital hygrometer" and buy one for less than $15 shipped to you.
I like to keep my flutes in a large drawer with a cup of water and a wet rag to act as a wick. I keep the relative humidity between 40% - 60%.
The drawer is not air-tight, and this minimizes the growth of mildew or mold.
Craic, not crack.

I also have a digital hygrometer in my music room where I keep all of my instruments. However, rather than trying to humidify a small area, such as a drawer or plastic container, I try to humidify the whole room with a humidifier that runs day and night. There are two kinds of humidifiers that you can easily purchase. One is called a "cool mist" humidifier, which physically atomizes drops of water and forces the cool mist up into the room. These make me cough unless I use distilled water, because the tap water has chlorine and minerals that get included in the mist. The kind of humidifier that I use has a heating element that distills water into steam. You do have to clean the accumulated minerals from the heating element, but you don't have to breathe the stuff in the air, as the steam is distilled water.

The bottom line is that humans dry out during the Winter months just like our wooden instruments do. To avoid cracked lips, sore noses, more frequent colds, etc., maintaining a proper humidity in the indoor living environment makes good sense. You don't want to get the humidity too high, though. Last winter I boiled water on the kitchen stovetop to add moisture to the air. I guess it got a little too humid in the kitchen, and whole sections of paint on the kitchen ceiling bubbled down and had to be removed and repainted. My wife wasn't pleased with me, as you can still see the boundaries where many years of paint had accumulated with repeated paintings.

I also have a small lathe in my work room where I have the humidifier. I have found that if I want to work on the lather turning pvc, I need to have sufficient humidity in the room. If the humidity gets too low, the static electricity will make the plastic shavings cling to everything, including my fingers, making it next to impossible to keep from saying bad words (under my breath, of course).

[sbfluter]

Well, it was pretty dry last week or two, but now it seems the rainy season has finally started. Back to normal I guess.

[chas]

I have a rubbermaid container with a couple of cigar humidifiers and a digital hygrometer. It stays pretty reliably between 50-55%.

[Blackwood]

Arizona baby, relative humidity in the summer down to 2%!

titanium case with sponges and ziplock bags with holes in them 55%!

[Jennie]

Craic, not crack.

When you get the tee-shirts printed, can I have one?

Our house is heated by wood, and we keep a pot steaming on the wood stove, but it surely is a dry season. I oil my flute more frequently at this time, too. So far so good. I'm guessing that my fat old blackwood flute is more resilient than some others I've seen. It seems happy, anyway!

Jennie

[Gostrangely]

Living in the west of Scotland has some advantages, few but some, the relative humidity is 80% today and never seems to fall below 50% whatever the time of year, in addition I have air heating which does not seem to dry out the internal atmosphere as much as central heating.

[lixnaw]

Humidity recommendations seem to vary from different makers and different areas. Dave Copley's advice to me was to stay between 60 and 80%, and 72%'s what the meter reads in my flute container. The humidity in my living room is 45% now.

[Nelson]

I don't know if I had it delivered from China or not when Jeanie et al were at my WV homestead but it is a lawyer's bookcase with sliding (up) glass fronts on each bookshelf. I got some nice velvet and some thin foam and made pads for the shelves. It turns out that it takes an area of about 5 square inches of water surface area to keep the volume of a bookcase shelf (or a drawer) at about 50% relative humidity. I stuck 4 hooks on the back of each shelf and hung little plastic bottles, each of about one square inch area top, on the back of the shelf, out of the way. The lid folds up and a drilled a hole in it to fit on a hook. It is minimum work to fill the bottles ocationally. I also heat with wood and have to do something. Johnny Gallagher uses natural gas, as do most people in WV, in his shop and it always stays at 50% because methane plus oxygan give carbondioxide and water when burned. The natureal gas stoves do not have chimnies, like a cook stove.

[dcopley]

This all gets down to the question of what is the best humidity, and why do different makers have different recommendations. Like a lot of other flute-related topics, we don't really have enough data to nail this down, so we have to rely on (more or less) educated guesswork. Here is my take on the situation.

If you had the time and money to get hold of a hundred metal-lined wooden barrel joints, and kept them in a humidity of 0-10%, most (and probably all) would crack. If you kept them at 90-100% humidity, few or none would crack, but they would all develop mold or mildew. Somewhere in between is the happy medium. With even more money and patience you could do the experiment over the range of humidity levels and construct a graph of of probability of cracking versus humidity. I think you would end up with a high probability of cracking (close to 100%) from zero to around 30% humidity, and a low probability of cracks from 50% to 100% humidity. In the range of 30% to 50% relative humidity the probability of cracks would increase sharply with decreasing humidity.

So it would make sense to keep the humidity above 50%, and I tend to err on the cautious side and recommend higher than that, since I don't see much problem with a higher humidity as long as you don't get to the point of growing mold.

Dave Copley
Loveland, Ohio

[Cathy Wilde]

- One of those Sterilite storage bins from Wal-Mart with little "airholes" under the handle
- A Humistat and hygrometer in the tote
- Ziploc bag with damp sponge if more humidity's needed in the tote
- Individual Humistat in a flute's case when it leaves the mothership

Household humidity average 35% in winter; with woodstove blazing 30% (when I'm home all day I do the pan of water like Jennie).

Humidity in tote: 60-65%.

Total investment: about $20.

So far, so good.

[Cathy Wilde]

But while we're on the subject, I'm going to file this recent event into the Repository of Strange Crack Arcana:

Since my experience with a heartbreaking crack (the first hurts the worst ) in NYC a few Decembers ago, I've made it general winter policy not to toot my flute until it's reasonably close to room temperature. I'll open the case, even assemble it and put it on my lap, but I'll play my whistle 'til the flute doesn't feel cold to the touch. Don't know if it makes any difference (so far no more cracks), but I remember Jon and others talking about hoop stress, etc. which all makes sense -- and it just makes me feel better.

Last month our little band recorded an hour-long radio show about an hour's drive from here. It was cold outside, and alas, the studio wasn't exactly tropical -- probably about 60 degrees tops and in an old, damp building. (Most of those in attendance kept their coats on the whole time)

As anyone who's seen the Mighty Banana knows, it's got more than its fair share of SuperGlue, etc. in its history, with an impressively wide repaired crack in the foot (yeah, John Gallagher!), and two small repaired hairline cracks in the head and barrel.

Well. I let the flute warm up (as much as possible in that room), but within five minutes of playing it for the sound check I could tell something was wrong. I figured something was leaking somewhere, and the fact that condensation was dripping out of the flute was a pretty good clue that the "bore temperature" was lots warmer than the outside of the flute being exposed to the cold room.

There wasn't much to be done, of course; we had to play. Being as I'd stupidly left my beeswax (and my Delrin flute !) at home I smeared a little cork grease around the tenons and sockets (though already soaked), and for good measure smeared a little around the barrel crack.

So about 20 minutes into the show, the flute's not itself, deader than a doornail and I'm depressed and having NO fun and there's condensation running out the joints and fingerholes.

THEN CAME THE SPRAY.

Yep, no kidding -- right in the middle of a set, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a fine mist shoot into the air not once, but several times ... the Banana was spouting like a wee whale! As soon as I finished the B part I looked at the barrel and there was water beaded all along the repaired crack.

Fast forward to now, about a month and a good 40 playing hours later -- although I've been thinking about wading in and doing a little more triage on the crack, the flute's been fine ever since.

How's that for bizarre?

But if you want to send Mulder out to investigate I won't mind.

[Jayhawk]

OH CATHY! The mighty banana is a beast of high character and unique charm! While I imagine how frustrating the radio gig was under those circumstances, it sure makes a good tale.

It's too bad you didn't have your Forbes with you. Does it warm up quickly? The M&E is so thick that unless I thoroughly warm it prior to playing in winter it's a condensation factory...

Eric

[cocusflute]

I think you need this: Sam Murray three-key with ivory crown and end-cap.

[Cathy Wilde]

get thee behind me ....