Our Workshops and Some History

Our two workshops are set up with very different equipment and so we share the work involved in making flutes according to our skills and experience.

Tony's workshop is located in Northamptonshire in the UK and is where the flute is initially made without any keys fitted. All the joints are made and tone holes drilled and some initial tuning performed. The tone hole's outer edges are also smoothed as this helps get just a little more volume from each of the notes.

For keyed flutes, the flute bodies are then sent to Mona's workshop just outside Paris where she fits the keys, springs, pads and cork bumpers. Mona also makes the casting master keys from which moulds for the flutes' keys are made.

The "dressed" flutes are then sent back to Northamptonshire for final tuning before being sent off to the customer.

Mona is from Vienna, Austria. She completed the three-year program 'woodwind making and repair' in Newark-on-Trent in England, with distinction. She worked with various instrument makers in England and Ireland and then from 1998-2005 with the clarinet manufacturers 'Schwenk&Seggelke' in Bamberg, Germany, before founding her company 'molem' in 2005. She specialises in fitting the very best keywork to very specialised and high class woodwind instruments.

Tony is a woodwind instrument maker and researcher who also specialises in making historic copies of bassoons and oboes from the late 17th and early 18th Century. These instruments are used in orchestras and ensembles playing music from that period. His workshop is particularly focused on making the complex and high tolerance reamers used to make the flute bores. Tony also plays in an early music group playing various wind instruments.