The Moretown, Vermont-based Geoghegan Company's Phoenix flutes #1-21 were made between April and December of 1980.
Phoenix flutes #22-52 were made in 1981.

The E.V. Powell model flutes #0-30 were made between Jan and Aug of 1982, when the company ceased production.

Silver-soldering tone holes on a Phoenix flute in November 1980. This is probably flute #17. Ted Jerome is on the left, and Mike Geoghegan is on the right. This process was invented by us, and was fraught with peril, but despite that we never "lost" a flute body to overheating/melting. The body tubing was .014" thick compared to the tonehole's average thickness of .060", so the heat needed to be applied mostly to the more massive toneholes during the procedure until everything reached about 1000 degrees F, when the silver solder would flow. Making flute bodies in this way caused the body tubing to become "dead soft", which would have sounded terrible if we didn't counteract it with another innovation, artificial age-hardening of the silver. More about silver age hardening here.

What you can't see in this still photo is the constant, darting motion our torch flames are making. We needed to apply heat directly to one tone hole area at a time (after an initial overall heating-up), but only for a second or two before needing to flick the flames away before overheating the body tubing. Gradually, we'd build up the heat to the temp we needed for solder to melt, which was tested visually (we worked in dim light while doing this so we could discern the *very* slightly red color of the silver when it was near the right temp) and by touching the wire solder (which you can see in my right hand) to the tone hole/body tube joint every few seconds until it finally melted.

The dark-colored "X"s you can just make out in the photo (closeup coming eventually...) on top of each tone hole are steel "jigs" that are screwed into temporary holes in the body tubing and are used to hold the tone holes in exactly the right place along the tube during soldering. Becasue they stuck up into the flame area, these jigs got red-hot during soldering.

The reason we went to all of this trouble, rather than using the 100+ year-old method of using low temperature lead solder, is that we wanted to make a flute that would *never* suffer a "raised" tone hole. This happens with lead-soldered tone holes at some time, sooner or later, when the lead hardens with age and becomes brittle. Then a slight flexing of the flute in normal use pops a seam of a tone hole, and you have an air leak.

1980 Phoenix brochure showing difference between silver-soldered toneholes and traditional lead-soldered ones.

Fourteen years later, Verne Q. Powell, Inc. published a newsletter describing their "technological breakthough": silver-soldered toneholes...better late than never. It's good technology, but it wasn't invented at Powell. (No offense, guys—it's been 20 years! ;-) (Scan of Fall 1994 VQP newsletter)

View of my headjoint-making workbench. The rack by the window shows several headjoints in progress. The custom-made (by Solly Ostroff, a tool-and-die maker and later a flutemaker himself) blue bench "lathe head" on the left was used for a variety of purposes. The most common use was to hold various abrasive wheels (seen on the tall rack at far left) for performing fine metal-removing tasks such as "cleaning up" silver castings to a smoothness that could then be polished on a finer-grit device (the polishing wheel, seen in another photo). All photos by Ted Jerome, except where noted.

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