The material for my silver flute will be pretty expensive and I am planning to build only one. Therefore I am practicing with cheaper copper. Copper is a lot less expensive but should have similar properties. This will allow me to figure out:
1. The overall design
2. The hole positions
I have ordered 4 tubes with 20mm diameter and 1 mm wall size which equals 22mm outer diameter of the tube. The tubes measure 500mm in length and cost around $5 each.
The difference to silver will be hardness and weight. On “Mohs Hardness Scale” silver is at 2.5 – 3 and copper at 3 which should be relatively similar. The weight is also relatively close at 8.96 g/cm^3 for copper and 10.49 g/cm^3 for silver.
I can already tell that the flute will be pretty heavy when holding a copper tube. I guess more than 1mm wall size will not be feasible if I want to play the flute comfortably.
The tube seems very straight forward to be used for the bore. The only hard part will be the mouth piece. But I will deal with this later. The bigger issue is that I have no good idea how to make the sound/nest area. I could cast it or use a block of material and saw/file it to the desired shape. I decided for the “casting” method for now and ordered a 5mm thick copper plate with the dimension 100mm width and 100mm length which should be big enough no matter how the nest area will look like. I got 4 of them because I am sure I will make mistakes and the number of 2-3 iterations has proven to be a good number for me.
