Romain Braude Flute Made in France

  I recently picked up an antique flute from an auction site. I didn't know what to expect because I had never worked on this brand before. All I knew about the flute is what I could see from the pictures, and that was that it was a closed hole, inline g, a c foot, and y and soldered arms for the keys. Upon getting the flute, this is what it looked like. 

It was filthy, had a few rust spots on the screws, needed new pads and lots of oil. I finally got the keys off and discovered a few things. First, the flute has soldered tone holes. Next, it had the strangest pad retaining washer I had ever seen.

The washers were stuck because the last person who worked on this flute used some sort of resin to float the pads like you would a clarinet or even a piccolo. Side note:: If you happen to have a flute like this and need to remove those washers, vampliers work GREAT if you do not mind messing up the pads. The link is above if you want to check them out.

After working on the flute for a few hours, I finally got to where I could start cleaning off the tarnish and seeing what the plating (I am assuming it is plating) looked like. 

Turns out the plating was not bad at all. There are a few deeper scratches that I could not get out with just cleaning, but overall, it looks great! Here is a picture of the finished product. It will be for sale very soon, so make sure you keep an eye out for it.