I’ve been working on these for a couple of months. I was hoping to be ready for Christmas, but you just can’t rush research. So, without further ado, the Stonehenge whistle!
These are made of DuPont Corian, the same stuff that countertops are made of. Corian comes in a variety of shades, and I currently have this blue, a black color, and a couple of sandstone-like colors which I’ll be posting to my website in the next couple of days. I’ll be getting a green malachite-like color soon, too.
Corian is waterproof, durable, scratch resistant, dense, and looks really neat. It’s is a little more difficult to work than wood in some ways, so the price will be the same as one of my hardwood whistles. The good news is that there’s no resting time built into the manufacutre, so currently, the wait time on one of these is a lot shorter than my wooden whistles.
I will be organizing a tour of this whistle in the next couple of weeks, if anyone is interested
Corian doesn’t behave like wood..i went through a bit of it before I discovered the magic numbers on how fast and how deep I could make cuts. Drilling is a bear.
As for the tour: I will be starting the tour next friday (1-12-07), and will take the first 10 people who pm me their addresses. Each person will get to keep the whistle for 2 weeks. That’ll keep things short and sweet, if you can call a 6 month tour short
Wow, a lot of interest right away…only 2 more slots on the tour.
The list currently stands at (in no particular order)
livethe question
dyersituations
King Friday
Aanvil
BoneQuint
anniemcu
Tommy
PhilO
I ask that anyone on the tour be willing to ship the whistle to the next person via priority mail with tracking and insure the whistle for $100. That means the cost to you is about $6.85 to try the whistle out for a couple of weeks and send it on. I’d like it insured, because it’s going to spend a lot of time in the mail and if the post office breaks it, they should pay for it
My biggest concern was getting an invisible seam. Corian doesn’t come in 1" thicknesses, or if it does, it’s nearly impossible to find. So, I have to marry two pieces, and make the seam invisible, and make the bond strong enough to hold up to the rigors of turning it into a whistle. The recommended “welding” glue DuPont offers is very strong, but not invisible by any stretch.
The picture of the side of the mouthpiece, where you can see the black delrin fipple actually shows the seam. That picture’s about 500% bigger than life, and I still had to look really hard to find it, and I knew where it was.
The tour is now closed. Welcome fearfaoin and Flogging Jason to the list I’ll get the whistle out the end of next week.
What’s the name of this tune? From the filename I thought it was
going to be Rolling in the Ryegrass, but it turned out to be some
hornpipe(?) in Emin… I like it!
I’m always coming up with little projects and such, and I considered trying to make a whistle. I found some very interesting material at a Woodcrafters store, they make pens out of them. The problem was that the pieces are all too short. I decided that the way to do it would be to make a 2 or 3 piece whistle, not unlike the way they make Flutes. After figuring out all the tools I’d have to buy I gave up. but If you’ve developed a method of joining pieces you should check out they’re selection of woods and other materials.
On an unrelated note: I told my wife that I wanted one of your Whistles for Christmas (gave her the website etc…). I anxiously awaited Christmas, purposely did not check under the tree for boxes that might hold a whistle, so I didn’t ruin the surprise. The big surprise was that she didn’t get me a whistle. She was afraid of getting the wrong one. I may have to take matters into my own hands.
Heheh! A lady did buy a whistle like that for her husband back in November. I had nearly a full month’s anxiety about it due to the same fear: that the guy wouldn’t like the tone, wood, key, whatever, and I’d have ruined his Christmas. I can be neurotic sometimes. Happily, he wrote me and let me know he really liked his gift
The tour was closed last page…less than 24 hours. I know that didn’t give everyone a lot of time to get in before it filled up, but with 10 folks, the tour will be about 6 months long. Hopefully by then, I’ll be able to start another one with tunability or some other feature. I’ll change the title of the thread to reflect the tour being closed..
