A new Hive friend light-heartedly told me to break out the Blood Ravens - a suggestion that I loved more and more as I pondered it.

See, I just read earlier this week about how some people will make a certain sound before laying out offerings to the crows, so that they associate the sound with a fresh bounty - so when a kind Scotsman suggested that the Ravens come back out I thought:

This could be the sound, that brings the crows around!

…but there was one small hitch. I remembered that previous attempts to play this flute outdoors have yielded mixed results, with a higher rate of failures than successes.

The flue on the native american style flutes is particularly sensitive to wind; even a slight breeze can be enough to silence it or make it squelch.

Artist: False Knees

Quoth Paul Simon, What’re You Gonna Do About It, That’s What I’d Like to Know

I apologize, I dinnae think to document my work on this DIY until a couple of the initial steps were completed - so I’ll have to catch you up with text only:

I found this leather book cover the other day, when I was making my No-Heel shoes, but this leather seemed too nice to waste on shoe soles, so I used the slightly undersized piece of rough-cut hyde and set the book cover to the side. Today, I profit from this decision!

The first thing I did was cut a ginger ale box down to fit in. My plan is that this should keep it rigid enough. Only the finest ingredients when you’re makin’ with old Albie 🤣

I put the cardboard into the book cover slots, rolled the cover to a close, so the carboard had a radius/wouldn’t crease, but the corners were touching - and then I smacked one corner with a leather rivet - BOOM!

I wanted to make this work with as little effort as possible, and as little modification to the book cover as I could get away with. I initially debated some sort of heel strap to keep the rear pirtion of the cover snug, but found that the pre-existing strap for holding the book shut would work just right…with the addition of a riveted snap connector.

So, outside of the aesthetic work of doing a gradient sanding job, I’ve now made three majot modificstions to get this flute exactly where I want it (and fortunately, they’ve all been documented on Hive!):

1. The fetish saddle(s): This was critical for consistency, and actually I looked at the maker’s latest works, and she now includes a groove to lock the fetishes down. Mine was made out of paint stirring sticks from the hardware store 🤣
2. The drone choke: The air velocity required to play the right chamber was enough to squelch the drone chamber. After a year or so of trying to blow only partially into the drone chamber, I decided to add a calculated choke to the inlet to simplify playing.
3. And finally, today’s addition, optional 4 wheel drive mode! Hopefully this theoretical design will pan out and I will be able to now get improved playability in outdoor settings.

Finally, I wanted to test it before taking it out to the lake. As sensitive as these flutes can be to air pressure changes at the cutting edge, it’s possible for a wind break to kill the output all-together, and I wanted to ensure that would not be the case.

-Also, @caspermoeller89 told me a few months ago that it was possible to upload a video via Ecency, and I’ve wanted to test that out ever since…so here’s a test run of both the Blod Ravnene wind break, and uploading a video via Ecency!

UPDATE:
Very cool, it worked! The wind break was a success, but also, the video upload through Ecency went smoothly…in fact, this could be my new favorite way to upload videos…

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Thanks for checking out some more of my work! As always, I hope you enjoyed witnessing as much as I enjoyed creating!

© Photos and words by @albuslucimus, except where otherwise indicated.

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If you enjoy my content, check out the Albus Index!

Here you’ll find links to various post-groupings, so you can find all posts related to a specific topic quickly. Topics include lists of brewing recipes, flutes, crypto talks, rucking posts and an index of all acoustic covers. The lists are updated as new content is added, so they can always be used to quickly navigate my content.

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