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Re: An interesting NEW barrel from "Clarinets by Copeland"

Author: David Spiegelthal ★2017
Date: 2020-07-24 00:23

I've used Delrin (a Dupont trade name by the way) for several projects, not all of them musical, and I can tell you it's a good engineering material. It is most definitely a plastic (acetal resin as Paul wrote), it is somewhat denser than wood, and best of all it machines easily and cleanly. You can drill (and tap) very smooth and accurately-sized holes in it, for example. I made a low-C extension for bass clarinet out of the stuff, turned out nicely.

When I was a kid some of the better bicycles has derailleur systems made by a French company called "Simplex", which featured control levers made of Delrin. I believe that was one of the first large-scale uses of the material in a consumer product. Those levers were a somewhat flexible compared to the typical metal ones, but were damn near unbreakable.

I remain skeptical that anyone would be able to hear an audible difference between two barrels, one of grenadilla and the other of Delrin, if they had EXACTLY the same lengths and bore dimensions. I'm of the "Arthur Benade School" that believes material composition has no more than a miniscule effect on the tone quality of thick-walled woodwinds (clarinets, oboes and to a lesser extent bassoons).

All that said I use a Robert Scott barrel made of Delrin on my Eb clarinet, not specifically because of the material, but because it just tunes well on my particular instrument.

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