New flute material - wood veneer tubing

New flute material - wood veneer tubing

I had an interesting trip to the Colorado Renissance Festival this Summer. I was walking by the elephant ride... you all know where that is... right? There was this bamboo flute stand...

Rod Baird ( Sound Creations ) has been making flutes since 1974 and coming to the festival for a while but I think not every year. I don't make it every year either, so I may have missed him and I did not remember him. We got to talking and I mentioned that I make mostly PVC flutes. We compared notes about several styles we make... side blown fifes, shakuhachis, Native American style flutes... I said I really like working in the PCV medium but it is certainly not beautiful like a lovely wooken flute...

Then Rob said... "Oh, you are going to like this..." He pulled out a lovely wooden flute, but said this is "wooden PCV pipe"! Actually, hardwood veener prefabricated tubing! Whoa! Was that beautiful! And as easy to make a flute as PCV pipe!... almost...

Well, mechanically it is as easy, but there are differences too. Like, that I can save the time to craft the tube, but I still have to finish the wood which is not needed with PVC! Sealing and protecting the wood tube is obviously a very important part of this flute material, but it is basically the same as a fully hand crafted flute in regard to sealing the sound producing mechanism. Wooden and PVC flutes will both "wet out" by condensation obstruting the "flue" and cutting edge which ruins the sound until it dries out again. With wooden flutes it is a lot more serious problem especially if the wood is not adequately sealed and the wood expands from absorbing moisture, which PVC does not do! So... I would have a new experience making my first wooden flute! I have made a few bamboo flutes, but bamboo is not as sensative to the moisture as wood!

Over a few days I searched the internet for suppliers of wood veneer tubing. It turns out that there are many uses for the stuff! One of the really nice uses is to cover metal or 2x4 columns and change them into a beautiful wooden column! It is very structurally hard and strong even with 1/8" walls which make it very light. It also uses our dwindling hardwood resources very efficiently. I connected with Ed Nash at Lenderink Technologies ( http://lenderink.com ), and as luck would have it, they were making some smaller tubes! Ed said he had some 1" (cedar), 1.25" (Southern Pine) and 2" (Walnut) tubes available right then! Cool!

It took a few weeks to save my pennies (although it was not expensive, it was not as cheap as PVC!) then I had to lay out a design. I decided to do a 1.25" C4 flute first and I had never built that key flute before. I usually figure that my first flute in a new key will be a throw away. I get the design close, but by the time I get it tuned there are usually one or more finger holes that are too big to play reaasonably. This time I was delighted to see very consistent and easily playable holes! Woo Hoo! It sounds pretty good too!

Here are some pics of the C4, 1.25" Southern Pine flute. The sound mechanism is similar to the system used by many Native American and pipe organ flutes. For you flute afficianodes, the diameter/column ratio is 19.74 which in the acceptable NASF range. There is a pre-chamber (SAC or slow air chamber), then a short "flue" that shoots a jet of air onto a cutting edge. If you look carefully at the end shot you may be able to see the wood and glue laminations. The inside and middle layers are poplar on the pine tube. Click the thumbnails to enlarge them.

The sound samples were recorded hastily with my Zoom H4 and also hastily cleaned up with Audacity. For the first sample I just recorded one track of the traditional hymn "Oh Sacred head Now Wounded". For the second sample, I laid down an adlib background track, then adlibed a lead track over that. I think it came out nice for one-takes. It reminded me of the woods just as the campfire is dieing down. So it is "Evening Forest".

(Click to play mp3)

F3_BF1_Evening Forest (original)

F3_BF1_OhSacredHead (Hymn)

I hope you enjoy it Ed and Rob! Thanks Ed for giving me the opportunity to try out this amazing new-to-me material!