Dear all, I have just been in contact with one of the major musical flight case manufacturers in Europe, and after many years he has finally considered - after much manipulation from yours truly - to make such things for lutenists. This would mean that we can finally check in our lutes/theorboes/etceteras safely in the hold of aeroplanes, stop having to have our patrons buy all those second tickets for our instruments (which often costs us the gig itself), excellent protection from shocks, being left on the sunny tarmac, neanderthal baggage handlers, etc. - in short, excellent. Our lutes would love us.
These cases would probably be about twice the price of a regular (i.e.NOT reinforced or light version) kingham case - but much better/more practical/longer enduring. The exteriors can be made from a special kind of fibreglass, or a more lightweight carbon. The catch is that to develop these cases he would need to invest much of his own money into the research, and he is not yet convinced that there is enough of a market for it afterwards to recupe his investment, should he endeavor to do such a thing. He estimates this research and trial period would only take about 8 weeks, meaning that these cases could in theory be ours as soon as Christmas. I thus thought I would conduct a totally unscientific poll just to see how much interest there might be out there from the 300 or so members of the lute net. If I had some support and interest from you (in the "vous" sense) then this might help convince the maker to finally make top-end cases for lutenists. Please respond off-list. All best to all, Benjamin To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
