It's all hands on deck this week as we draw closer to the end of this semester, and to our flute deadline. I began this week by giving my project flute a bath, both in simple green and then phosphoric acid. Normally on a silver-plated flute like this, it would be followed by a rinse in silver dip, but I have some body work to do before I finish the dip. All of the rods, screws and pins were pulled and everything was wiped down.
After cleaning, I dove into some much needed body work. In particular, two of the ribs had to be re-soldered. It looks like this flute took a pretty hard hit at some point because a few of the keys have some pretty nasty bends and the ribs had been ripped away. After refitting the ribs with a brass bit that I shaped to fit around the posts, the ribs were tied down into place with binding wire and soldered with lead-free soft solder. Once this was done, the flute was silver dipped.
On to key fitting now. Key fitting on a flute is very similar to fitting a clarinet. There are hinge rods and tubes that get bent in the same way. One problem that occurred was wearing on the C/Bb/A hinge rod. This particular rod has two different functions on the flute. It acts as a hinge rod for the C key and as a pointed pivot screw for the Bb and A. In this case, the wearing was on the pivot screw portion. On most student flutes this wouldn't be a problem because, acting like a headless screw, you can simply tighten the screw to remove play. In this case, the rod is a little better made and is designed to butt up against the post, allowing for it to tighten like a headed screw. As a result, the shoulder of the rod had to be filed to fit to remove the play. This isn't a big issue, just an interesting one.
Continuing with key fitting, I found a major issue on the foot joint of the flute where the rib had to be re-soldered. There was a large amount of end play on the C key, to big to compensate through swedging or plastic shims. In order to fix this, I made a washer out of nickle silver on the lathe. I first had to square the face of the post and the ends of the hinge rod. I then turned a stock rod down to the diameter of the hinge tube, and turned a recess into it to the diameter of the hinge rod. I then faced the exposed nub to the exact width of washer that I needed. Using a drill bit the size of the hinge rod, I drilled into the center of the stock. Once the bit hit the recess, the washer was cut off and exactly the size I needed. The burrs were removed and it was a perfect fit.
After all the key fitting was done, I disassembled the flute and polished everything with silver polish. The flute is now ready for padding. After all of the work is done, the flute will be re-polished using a polishing cloth rather than paste, leaving the flute free of compound and finger prints.
It is now the weekend and the late night padding sessions have begun. Yesterday (Saturday) I managed to get my foot-joint padded with much difficulty. Thanks to metal memory, every time I leveled the C key, it would simply move back after 10 minutes or so. In addition, Artley's pad-cup design is absolutely terrible and has a small ring protruding right in the middle of the shim radius. But I continue onto the body today with a jug of orange juice and Hootie and the Blowfish playing on Pandora. The sooner I finish, the sooner I return to Canada for the holidays.
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