Lost Motion

You may have heard the term "lost motion" from your repair technician and wondered what exactly that meant.  We met up with flute finisher Karl Kornfeld here at the Powell shop to help shed some light on this term.  Karl explained that lost motion is a delay between pressing a control key and movement of the slave key.  For example, when depressing the left hand second finger, both keys should move together in unison.  If there is a delay before the slave key is "caught," then you have lost motion.  Lost motion can be caused by faulty adjustments or incorrect key-height settings.  As always, if you notice lost motion in your mechanism, the best solution is to take your flute to an authorized repair person.

Karl is depressing the control key, and the "slave" key is directly to the right (looking at the picture from the front).

Both keys should move together in unison.

If the slave key is delayed in closing, there is lost motion.