I recently got a Creality rotary roller (chuck) but I didn’t have it when I made this particular flute. This one was all done on a 3018 Pro with a 5.5W laser head added. This is my Sandpiper themed flute and it has more laser engraving than any previous flute. This flute departs for my usual style of flute in several ways. It was commissioned by a person with Parkinson’s who requested a number of modifications so that she could play it. For one thing, it is a side-blown flute, and left-handed with an ergonomic finger hole layout in order to put the flute and the finger holes in an easier to reach and hold positions. It was also made using Western Red Cedar to keep it as light as possible. It is a fairly large flute, a C4 at 679mm in length but only 171 grams. It sounds hauntingly beautiful and the player uses it to play for people in church and in palliative care.
It is probably more interesting to talk about the laser engraving on this flute. There is a trail of semipalmated sandpiper tracks meandering through the finger holes. I started from photographs I had made some years ago of the tracks in mud. Long enough ago that they were photographed on slide film. I imported a photo into Affinity Designer and selected an assortment of left and right tracks that were quite clear. I traced these outlines in order to get at least 3 or 4 different tracks for both left and right, so they wouldn’t just look like they were all the same tracks repeated. Since the photo was made on an angle I had to adjust the scale of each track to make sure they were all the same size.
Remember, I’m doing this without a roller. I wrapped a large piece of paper full length along the flute and made impressions for each finger hole. This was my layout map. Then back in Affinity Designer I created a life size layout that was easy to make accurate measurements and I placed the tracks on this layout where I wanted to burn them. I selected small groups of tracks that formed groups no wider than 2/3 the width of the flute. I think I made 6 or 7 groups of tracks that my laser etcher could burn in the limited area without running into curvature problems. I made a test burn of each set of tracks to make sure it would come out the right size. I made a masking tape frame on the flute to show where the next set of tracks was to be burned. I put a small piece of masking tape in the centre of the rectangle and marked an X at the centre. This is how I aligned the laser position for burning each group of tracks. Doing the burning took two full days. But I’m very happy with the results, and so was the customer.
In addition to the tracks there is a Sanderling burned on the left side of the flute near the top of the finger holes, and a Semipalmated Sandpiper burned on the right side of the flute near the foot.
Also, the feather totem for this flute is a Spotted Sandpiper feather design painted on a carved piece of wood. I used this type because it was the closest picture I could find online of an individual sandpiper feather.