Tell us something.: Crafting fine quality folk flutes from around the world since 1997, my goal is to create beautiful instruments that have the best possible voice, tuning and response by mixing modern methods with traditional designs.
Geoffrey Ellis wrote:
I don't think the sythetic ebony is any relation to ebonite. He describes it as being made with a resin of some kind. It might be a mix of wood dust and resin? Just guessing. Ebonite is a mixture of rubber sap, linseed oil and sulfur, which is then baked in an oven causing it to "vulcanize"--to turn into hard rubber. It's made of natural ingredients that are transformed using heat.
Thank you for the explanation. Indeed, I see now that it can't be the same thing: his synthetic ebony flutes are 30% cheaper that his wooden flutes. However, it seems that natural rubber sap can be replaced by a synthetic rubber (Styrene butadiene rubber, for exemple) and then vulcanized in the same mixture. Such synthetic "ebonites" seem to be used in the industry. There's no guarantee that the acoustic properties would be the same though. It would be exciting to have a material that is cheap and at the same time acoustically "interesting".
Very interesting--I never knew that vulcanization was used on synthetic rubbers. I, too, am curious to know how the acoustic properties of such a substance would compare to the natural rubber version.
