Cleaning dizi

Damn that was tiring, but fulfilling.

Today's a public holiday, and I spent a few hours in the morning till the early afternoon cleaning my dizi. I used a damp microfibre cloth to clean the exterior, then used damped cotton buds to clean the embouchure, tone, and vent holes. For those dizi that had joints, I took them apart at their joints, and cleaned out the old cork grease that I had put on before, rotated the connecting point repeatedly enough for the joints to grind out their non-round parts, cleaned that out, before replacing with a new thin layer of cork grease [from Yamaha].

``But MT, why did you purposefully made the joint grind itself smooth when we don't even do that for any other joints for concert flutes and the like?''

See, the problem with the dizi is that unlike the concert flute, the tolerances of the joints are not as tight. There is also an innate eccentricity due to these joints being attached completely separately from the boring through of the bamboo. These joints are also well-known for seizing up partly due to the eccentricity, and partly due to the corrosion. So, what I just did was to use the joint against itself to attain a more smooth/rounded outcome.

Of course, the proper way is to have a mandrel and shape things up carefully, but considering how many different sized dizi I was working with (around 27), that would be impractical.

As for the [Yamaha] cork grease, I found that it had the right balance of tack (i.e. stickiness), and lubrication that allowed the metallic parts of the joints to smoothly slide past each other. A smooth joint movement is important because it allows ease of performing fine-tuning at the 0.5 mm resolution.

If the joint sticks, tuning is hard, and there may also be leaks, which is bad.

My older dizi had much cleaner joints, since I had done the first deep clean before, while the newer ones had to undergo quite a bit of that grind-clean-repeat process. But the results are often so much worth it, especially that whole ``joints not seizing and are butter smooth for tuning purposes'' aspect.

After I had packed them away, I realised that I didn't do the same for the two or three xiao that I have lying around. Ah well.

The last thing to add about this is that I found that my latex glove size is apparently an S (85±10 mm). In-teresting. The context for the latex glove was for me to protect the broken skin that my fingers have from the occasions where I needed to use 70% Isopropyl Alcohol while doing the joint cleaning.

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In other news, I got my head shaved again. It was nice.

I restarted Blasphemous from the beginning again, and was doing much better with the rough guide on the sequence of areas to go through, as opposed to the breadth-first search method that I was using earlier, where I did not commit enough to an area to actually clear it completely and gain the necessary benefits.

Cannot remember what I last talked about for my Minecraft adventures, but I have built up a larger platform for my nether hub. I've figured out where the general places of interest in the overworld should be, and need to lay out the new starting points for the rails to follow that. The walls have been built up, but I haven't capped it with a proper roof, which resulted in many zombie pigmen piglins falling in and causing havoc.

I think that's about it for now. I'll probably play a bit more of Blasphemous before turning in for the night.

After all, tomorrow's a work day.