Finished!

So, my first flute is done despite a bit of a learning curve, and it turned out great. Here are the last few photo's of it as I finished up the project.

Here I'm about half way through the tuning process. You can see the bottom three holes are quite large compared to the pilot holes I drilled for the top three which hadn't been tuned yet at this point int he process.

Here I've completed tuning the flute and am almost done putting on the shellac to give the flute its finished look. (other students from the class working on various stages of their flutes in the background.)
There's the finished flute at home on our coffee table. I've yet to get a picture with my camera that really shows how nice it turned out. My instructor helped a good bit with this flute so I can't quite claim this one as my own. I'm well into my next flute however, and its going remarkably well. Updates on that to follow soon!!!

All....most..... there....

The flute is almost completed. Finished shaving it down to form and sanding the flute to 400 grit, will probably sand a bit more after the flute is tuned the rest of the way and has the six finger holes drilled out. Once that is finished it just needs to be shellacked and that'll do it for the flute itself. Still need to make a "bird" for the flute so it actually plays. I've been borrowing one for now just to tune it and such.

Old "nest" new bore.

had to cut all those little pieces off to tune the flute to F#

Preparing to shave the flute to its final form.

Shavings, and the final product. Pretty happy with this
considering everything this poor flute has been through.

Lathing in agony.

So, our little project has progressed to the lathe, which ended in a small disaster which resulted in a bit of a detour. Fear not though, all is well and the flute has been saved..... until Thursday when I return to the lathe anyway.
Visible on the left here is my original flute mounted to the lathe in preparation for being turned (made round). Unfortunately for my poor flute this venture ended poorly for it. Just to make this easier to understand, by the time I had achieved a round form on the flute the walls of said flute where very thin. As I continued to round the flute I..... well, I made an hour-glass shape out of it and ended up with a section so thin you could actually see light through it when looking down the bore. This of course, meant the flute had been ruined. As I mentally prepared myself to have to start over and make a new flute from scratch my instructor looked at what I had done and told me it could be fixed, but that it would require tools we did not have in the shop. In the mean time I needed to make a new bore to replace the existing one on the flute in preparation for this repair job. (then a weekend went by.)










So, I took the black walnut wood I wanted to use for my second flute and made a new bore out of it for this current flute. Today our instructor brought the specialty equipment in and we prepared the old flute for its new bore. This process involved removing the old bore and shaving the inside of the flute to make a wider opening. Then the new bore was shaved down to a size small enough to fit inside the old flute, thus (after some gluing) combining both pieces into one flute.










So, the flute is glued together and the glue is setting. The two pieces look good together and I plan to add a small turquoise inlay at the seam between the two pieces of wood to accent the transition point. Once this is done I'll go back to the lathe and turn the flute till both pieces match in size. After that all that remains is tuning the flute and calling it done.

Clicking on the photographs will give you a larger image to look at.