Nanohedron wrote: ↑Sun Apr 10, 2022 7:39 pm
So with boxwood it's more about
how you construct a flute,
and less about when (settling aside). Would a ten-year-old billet still banana (there, I've verbed it) if the flute weren't left to settle? How does one know when the settling is done?
You've just nut-shelled it. Two can play at this turn-a-noun-into-a-verb game!
I'm certain that having the wood very well dried
and seasoned is a good idea
and very important to helping with the warping. But working the wood in stages is a really big deal as well. There are lots of makers here with much more experience than I have with this part of flute making. I tend to cheat when making any type of flute that needs things like corked joints or tuning slides by using stabilized wood or ebonite. It's not realistic for me to do the whole work-it-in-stages type of process where I have a large stockpile of flute pieces in various stages of construction because I make too many different kinds of flutes. The planning
and management of all that stock would probably kill me. So I don't do it. The exception is when I plan on splicing together a few pieces to make a single piece flute (like that xiao). If I do that again, I'll settle the wood properly ahead of time.
But Loren mentioned in another thread the process they used at Von Heune,
and they have the whole work-it/rest-it thing going on.
I think that there are a lot of woods that are going to hang on to some amount of grain tension until they are actually finished
and being played. Ideally, it won't cause enough movement that you'll notice it. My theory about the banana xiao that I made is that in addition to not resting the wood enough, I also made it into a long, skinny flute.
That thing has about a 1" OD
and it's almost 30" long. The walls are about .15" thick. When I make long, skinny flutes they definitely show more tendency not only to warp, but to warp visibly. A shorter, stouter flute might not move as readily
and the bend won't be as obvious.