All our cups are cold-punched from solid silver flat-sheet in a handpress, then carefully stamped and shaped with crisp, high-relief bevels that enhance comfort and feel.
Each cup must be fitted and soldered to its corresponding arm, then gently filed and sanded to make the joint smooth and perfectly filleted.
...This exhaustive treatment creates clean, sharp bevels and a brilliant finish without the rounded, too-shiny look common to the machine-polished flutes of other makers.
Hand-Finished & Burnished
Mechanism
One would expect that a hand made flute should be assembled and fitted by hand, but mechanized mass production techniques have virtually eliminated the practice of hand fitting in our day, even among more respected makers.
Not so at Landell Flutes. Here each key is carefully built one-by-one using painstaking techniques perfected over centuries of flutemaking tradition.
Arms and levers are all sand-cast in solid silver or gold. To bring the rough castings into perfect proportion and shape, we spend days with files and tiny grinding wheels, slowly smoothing each part and cutting it to the correct dimensions.
All the flat key surfaces
are then scraped and burnished to a bright, warm finish with hand tools...
Lastly the keys are fitted
into sections. The time given to this fitting process known as "cutting
in" is crucial to a flawless and light mechanism.
Overall, the exceptional level of detailed attention given to the Landell
mechanism sets the whole flute on a level of craftsmanship rarely accomplished
today.