Flute Padding Addendum

Inevitably there are strange exceptions to the padding process I use. A bad pad that's too lumpy or has imperfections in the skin won't respond properly to shimming, and could eat up a lot of time, so they typically need to be discarded or repurposed. Sometimes a tone hole is so far out of level that the pad will only hit in one spot, and in that case the front-back relationship has to wait until that aberration can be address with half- or three-quarter-shims. Occasionally when tone holes are out of level I will file them, though lately I've been moving away from that. I find that, even after filing a tone hole, the imperfections in a pad can still be enough to require just as much partial shimming as might be required on an unfiled tone hole (although in different thicknesses and in different places on the pad.) In most cases, the extra investment of time spent filing seems not to save enough time in padding. I may revert to filing tone holes in the future, but for now I think the shimming technique is improving as I force myself to work with the unaltered, unlevel tone holes. Another 30 to 40 years, and I'm sure I'll have it figured out.