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"Pot Metal" Keys

Author: paul
Date: 1999-09-23 19:56

Actually, Boosey and Hawkes bought Buffet. IMHO, it was a good move, both for Buffet and for the clarinet market.

As for the use of low grade "pot metal" on certain models of certain brands of clarinet during certain times, I haven't a clue.

Today's good quality horns use a metal for keys that's most likely an alloy for the vast majority of the thickness of the key and then they electroplate it with either nickel, silver, or (for the truly fortunate few who can afford it) gold. From what little I can personally tell, the exact materials and metals for the keys is a guarded trade secret. The keys on the good horns (Buffet, LeBlanc, Selmer, Yamaha, plus the high end custom makers) can be bent slightly to meet each player's individual fingering needs and to make sure the pad clears the tonehole enough to not have an affect on that note's tuning when fully open. A good pro level player can bend the good horns' keys with bare hands and fingers to get it "just right", yet the key retains its strength and shape for a lifetime of playing. Lesser horns' keys cannot be bent for customization purposes without snapping fully in two, or getting so distorted that the key is basically useless. If this kind of low quality is what you mean by the term "pot metal", then I guess it's pretty much on target.

As a pure (and slightly educated) guess, I'd venture to say that the better horns' keys have a high amount of good quality steel (iron mixed with carbon and hardened by heating and quenching in a very specific way) in the alloy that can take the bending stress for slight adjustments and stay there, yet continue to be strong enough for pro level playing for decades. Steel has a very nice stress curve, taking lots of tensile (stretching) stress while retaining its original shape. Then, as the stress becomes greater, the steel stretches in a very consistent and predictable manner for a very long time until finally yielding in a catastrophic failure by snapping roughly in half. If you take a metal alloy consisting primarily of lead (which is much cheaper, hint, hint) and try the same thing, it doesn't take much stress to stretch it way out, with very little ability to retain its starting shape. Been there, saw that in a college level Strength of Materials engineering lab many years ago.

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