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| Full and partial shims that are used to make the pad level with the tone hole |
Monday, December 12, 2011
Week 16
Flute padding was the focus this week. Flute padding is different than clarinet padding because the majority of pads are not floating on glue. They are placed in the pad cup and are shimmed with paper or mylar shims to make it seal to the tone hole. Flute pads are made of woven felt, a cardboard back and a skin covering over the top. When padding, install the key to check the pad cup for levelness. If it isn't level to the tone hole flex the cup level to the tone hole first so that you only have to shim for inaccuracies in the pad. Shims are all different thicknesses ranging from 0.001" to 0.010". Shims are used to build up an area of the pad that is not touching the tone hole. To figure out where to put shims I used a feeler gauge of 0.001" thickness to check around the tone hole for drag. Where there was not any drag was a spot I needed to add a shim under the pad. Padding takes time, patience and practice.
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How do you know which thickness of paper shims use each time??? By eye (with leak light) or feeling???
ReplyDeleteAnothet thing, would you level a tone hole on a silver plated flute or only on sterling silver flutes???
Shimming can be a long process. It takes a lot of practice to know what thickness to use. When I started padding it was a lot of experimenting. Make sure you use a feeler gauge and your eye to check where the pad is leaking. If you are using a .001 thickness feeler gauge and the gauge moves freely use a .002 or .003. Sometimes when you add a shim it makes the pad leak somewhere else. You have to figure out how the pad is going to react. If it creates a leak somewhere else, the shim you added was probably too large. You can level a tone hole on a silver plated flute, but that should be a last step. Our motto at school was do not remove material from the instrument unless absolutely needed.
ReplyDeleteShimming is really a hard thing to do in the flute. I bought 5 to 6 different thicknesses.
ReplyDeleteAbout leveling tone hole, I heard both stories, always level them and this one you told me. Would you recommend this suggestion to sterling silver too???
Thanks Danielle
It would be better to level a sterling silver tone hole than one that is plated. Again, I am just repeating what my professors said. Once the material is gone, you can't replace it. Before we leveled tone holes we placed a level disc on top of the tone hole and looked at it with a leak light.
ReplyDeleteI hope that helps! Thanks for all the questions!