Author: shmuelyosef
Date: 2019-03-11 01:31
Just a bit of perspective, as someone who spent much of his life designing devices/apparatus/etc that require precision manufacturing.
Manufacturing started out as a craft...many just made functional objects (shovels, dishware, etc). Each one was unintentionally unique, so there were good ones and bad ones.
Artisans (just convenient terminology) made more complex objects that required precision, design, and often specific materials (e.g. blackwood). Their objects were often intentionally unique, but with some 'natural' variation that depended on their precision capability.
Manufacturing began when demand for specific objects exceeded the capacity of craftspersons. Machinery was designed to replace labor for specific components and controlled precision...keep in mind that 'precision' at any level still involves natural variation.
What CNC has done for industry is to allow the "specific" machinery to be emulated by a software-defined tool by being able to program an operation to be executed in three-dimensional (3D) space...like slicing, machining, grinding, polishing, cutting, laser-engraving, etc...
CNC allows designs in (nearly) arbitrary material sets to be replicated to very high tolerance, and has moved design to a more important place than manufacturing (which previously limited the complexity of objects to be replicated because of cost of the tooling, which now can also be fabbed by CNC).
This has freed up clarinet designers like Ridenour and Backun to experiment with new designs and contract to have them made. Today the biggest limitation on both the designs and the ability to execute on them is wood, which adds variation (Buffet is the best example of the unintended variation possible with wood). They are both experimenting with alternative materials....currently, mostly molded plastics, but I believe that the future will lie with fabricated preforms to gain access to superior materials with 'directional' properties (e.g. stiffness of the column, while avoiding things like the circumferential variation of mechanical properties of wood from grain direction issues.
As a physicist and materials scientist (past life...) I remain unconvinced that the difference between wood and properly engineered materials. By pretending to deny it, Buffet has successfully demonstrated that engineered materials (Greenline) can be accepted...it is hard to argue that any powder mixed with epoxy can be considered 'wood-like'; once Buffet runs out of their significant (I'm guessing) collection of scrap blackwood, they will switch to another filler material to add to their carbon fiber and epoxy matrix.
If you stop and think about it, historically wood was used because it was a convenient source of machinable, long sticks of solid material; one can argue about the wood in instruments where it is a resonant, radiating element (stringed instruments, percussion, etc...), but not woodwinds where the body of the instrument is a simple resonator for the air, not a radiator.
The predominant issue is that wood clarinets came first, and plastic clarinets were created because molding techniques made it a very inexpensive method. Straight bores and toneholes and old designs were used for most of these instruments. However, in the early 21st century, both Ridenour (hard rubber TR147 plus follow-ons) and Vito (the last ABS 7214s and V40s) demonstrated that very respectable instruments could be made.
An engineered material combined with CNC manufacturing of the very best designs could likely create a highly stable instrument that performs among the best. This could still be 'hand tweaked' with undercut reamers and custom barrels, etc, but would never warp or crack, and be drop proof (except of course the keywork alignment. There are an increasing number of keywork solutions available, although they do somewhat dictate tonehole placement.
I would love to see someone copy the Yamaha Custom SE and CS bore designs, for example, in a carbon-fiber loaded material (or HR) with the properly satisfying density and surface finish...many composite choices already exist that would work for clarinet 'blanks'. Right now all we have are the Ridenour designs which are naturally small-bore, small tonehole designs.
...end rant
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The Clarinet BBoard
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