I have a quite a few beautiful blanks already bored and ready to finish up into whistles. Some pretty wild stuff in there, including Yellowheart (bright canary yellow), Ziracote, Mun Ebony, CheChen, etc as well as some old favorites like Olivewood, Tulipwood and Blackwood. Contact me for a more specific list.
I will start a new batch in several weeks to a month, so if you’ve been thinking of a whistle in a wood that you don’t see above, just ask.
As of Aug. 1 of this year, I will be raising the prices of my whistles to $250 USD, all varieties of wood and Delrin. Choice of fittings, shipping costs, etc will remain the same. For any whistles ordered and paid before that date, I will be happy to honor the current price of $200.
As always, I thank everyone for their support and kind comments on my work.
how much for a blank of Tulip Poplar long enough to make a low D? I don’t have the means to hollow out wood myself… Need a lathe with one of them there weird spinny attachment thingies that hold the outside of the wood while you run the auger through it…
Sorry, I don’t have the facilities to do that.
You might want to reconsider Tulip Poplar too. That is a VERY soft wood with a hugely high moisture content which makes for a lot of shrinkage (and probably crackage too). I have patients who burn wood for home heat and one told me that he cut down some Poplars, split the wood and stacked the wood to the ceiling of his woodshed. By the time the wood dried, the level had gone down by about a third! I don’t think this would make a good whistle at all. BTW-- the Tulipwood that I and other instrument makers sometimes use is actually a tropical Rosewood of the Dalbergia genus, and is wonderful, very hard wood.
Aw well that would explain… I was about to say… Tulipwood is Tulip Poplar, Also known as Yellow Poplar. It’s not even a Poplar at all. The just call it that for some odd reason. it doen’t even have the same structure as a Poplar. Long Straight trunk and huge leaves…
Damn, too bad that didn’t happen to all the (tuliptree) branches that came down in my yard during all the storms last year.
Actually, they DO shrink, but they come down faster than I can haul them off. Also, FYI, I noted last weekend that a ~6"/15cm diameter branch that I had cut up checked about a foot in 8 months, much more than I would expect in, say, a piece of oak.