First Shawm - Putting it together

The foot section is now glued to the bell. Here is the whole foot section back on the lathe to be shaped down to final form.

Not visible here, but an offcut from making the foot section is a nice fit inside the bell for mounting it on the driven centre.

Despite all the care, the whole assembly was not altogether running true. I chose not to retrue it since this might have been not successful in a big way. I confined myself to cleaning up the obvious irregularities around the glued joint, and did most of the finishing by hand with a rasp and sandpaper.

The final step for the foot section: reaming out the 6mm central hole to the right size. I opened the bore to about 15mm with various twist drills, then worked up slowly from there to the final 27mm diameter with the reamer.

The shaped foot section is harder to grip safely than a rectangular blank section. Here I have made some semi-circular jaws and used these to clamp the foot, which has a leather wrapping to protect the surface.

Some waxed thread goes around the tenon on the upper section and it's a nice snuggish fit into the socket of the foot section.

In one piece!

I have not drilled any of the tuning holes yet. However, with a bassoon reed stuffed in the end, I can make an A flat, and a flattish octave above that, as you can hear from the recording. The experienced bassoon player in our household can extract an E flat from it, which is more in keeping of the final tuning.

I'm sortta pretty pleased with the overall result so far. The tuning will be the really interesting step, once I have sorted the proper reed and pirouette mounting.