Baroque Recorders
The first recorders I made were based, perhaps unsurprisingly on the a=440hz Dolmetsch altos. The tools I made for these instruments I copied from Ken's originals, which he had been using for many years. I realised quickly that I would have to try to make something more 'authentic' and, to be able to understand 'historical' instruments, at a=415hz.
At the L.C.F. we had an information bank with measurements and drawings of all sorts of wind instruments, donated by various different makers. Some of the information was of fairly dubious quality and often quite misleading, but before the days of the Zen-on publication of Fred Morgan's drawings, this was the best that could be found. I visited the London Museums, tried instruments in a few private collections and in my second year, decided that I would try to make copies of German instruments, rather than the more popular Bressan or Stanesby models. The English instruments were always lower in pitch than a=415hz, often as low as a=405hz. As a result, copies of these instruments have to be made shorter than the originals, to play at a=415hz, leading to inevitable complications. (Most players then as now, seemed to think that a=415hz was 'the' baroque pitch standard.) Another reason for the German instruments was that although I'd heard from players and on the discs of original instruments I'd heard, that the Denner models were very good, few people at that time were working on them and I liked the idea of trying something new.
I visited Museums in Copenhagen, Basle and Nuremberg and came back feverishly clutching my precious measurements, full of ideas for reproducing exact copies of the recorders I'd seen and played. My measurements of the Jacob Denner alto in Copenhagen proved to be the basis for the more than 400 instruments of that type, that I've made since 1982. I still feel that the original is the best design of baroque alto that I've seen. Although some could criticise it's lowest few notes and the balance between it's registers, the evenness of the sound over the breaks and the speech and clarity in the upper register more than make up for this.
The second design I worked with was a voice flute, or perhaps using more correct terminology, a tenor recorder in c at around a=466hz! The design came from a tenor recorder by J. C. Denner, in the Nuremberg museum. While the instrument played quite well, there were several tuning problems that required not only changes to the bore, but also to the hole positions, to make it play in tune with itself.
I think it was around this time that I stopped slavishly copying instruments and started to try to think like an instrument maker in my own right. On this instrument for example, most of my customers wanted to play French flute music, unaccompanied pieces for alto in a minor third lower, or even modern music. I felt that modern demands were quite possibly far in excess of that demanded of the old instruments, encompassing many different styles of music from widely differing periods, and the temptation to experiment myself, in the end just proved too great. Of course there is an awful lot to be learnt from old instruments, by both players and makers, but I think you arrive at certain point where you feel too limited by not experimenting with the more fundamental design points of an instrument. I think that this was the moment for me to take some recall and work out what was driving me to make musical instruments. I think that in the end, it was  that I wanted to created something myself, and not just copy another's work.
The great authenticity cycle seems anyway to have drawn to a conclusion around the end of the eighties, but will no doubt come around again. The next generation of players and makers will undoubtedly think that we've gone too soft and wish to impose a more fundamentalist attitude. Some-thing which is of course, a very positive thing for the development of both music and instrument making.
Since these early designs, I have made many different models of baroque recorders, in most sizes from sopraninos to basses.