At the college I worked at in New York they had a heated ramp – copper pipe laid in the concrete through which warm water flowed in the winter to prevent ice. The concrete would flake off that area with great regularity.
]]>For a while, before I gave it back to its original owner (whose grandfather had owned it), I had a flute, made probably in the 1860s, the head joint of which was some black hardwood lined with a sleeve of some metal. I’m sure it had desirable playing characteristics in its day, but its structural collapse… cracks in the wood of the headjoint… was inevitable from the very way in which it was made. Woodwind instruments regularly encounter extreme “weather” … drastic short-term temperature and humidity changes… in their normal daily use. The catastrophic failure of a lined headjoint can, I’m told, be quite loud, almost like a gunshot.
These days, wind instruments are typically made of wood or of metal, but not of both (at least not in the same segment of the instrument). Bridge designers, please take note.
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