re: Joining the Straight Sections

Thanks Splint.  

Coming apart is definitely a possibility I suppose, especially if it gets wet by playing in the rain on a mountain top or maybe even just from seasonal changes.  Traditionally, they wrapped the straight section with wood reed split from birch.  When the alphorns are made by splitting a tree with a curved root flare in half, they may not have even glued them back together after hollowing but just bind them with the reed?  I did not spend much time looking but finding wood reed is difficult and I was not going to try making my own.  I do have some bamboo cane for weaving chair seats from a previous project and I considered wrapping the entire tube with that.   Since the external  sleeves are glued on to one end of each segment, I figure that will help keep that end together.  The other end has the internal sleeve glued in which should also help to hold it together so I decided to forgo wrapping it with the cane.  Time will tell.   As with most experiments, part of the idea is to learn what works and doesn't work.  Note that many of the commercially made segmented alphorns are not wrapped and do not even have the external sleeves at the joints like mine has.  They typically just have internal aluminum sleeves to hold them together.