Impossible. The end.
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Untrue. Absolutely.
Difficult, yes, touchy, yes, but based on experience there are many cylindrical whistles that are in tune over two octaves.
On what do you base your post?
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Indeed there are cylindrical whistles with great intonation, but all I have found, seen reviews have had some kind of modification to the bore. A pertubation(s), fadjardo like wedge, slight tapering bore.
I have been looking through many posts on here about tuning and octave balance. You find instruments with powerful first octaves with very flat second octaves which are difficult to overblow and in many cases become too shrill. On the other hand, you find whistles that over blow well and are sweeter with better tuning (ofeten the fist octave is tuned sharp to favour the second). In the latter, the first octave becomes a lot more weak witout leeway to lean into.
I know this subject matter has been discussed many times in this forum, so apologies if this thread sounds like a broken record. What would be nice is to open up the discussion further with regards to balancing first and second octave performance, compared also to windway and window design.
I made a PVC Whistle in high D about 3 years ago and could never balance the octaves. It’s just not possible without further bore modifications.
Chang my mind! 
And nice to meet you Chas 
Yes, I find most can be blown into tune.
Which is how you play a whistle. It doesn’t sound otherwise, and like all wind instruments it needs the player to fine-tune how they blow the air in.
After all, fiddle strings aren’t in tune without modifications to the tension, fretting and bowing.
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Nice to meet you too, Dares.
I’m only aware of Mike Burke making whistles with perturbed bores. Maybe some European makers, I think I played one by a Swiss guy once? And Clarke, Shaw, Copeland, Bleazey, Swayne, and Morneaux making tapered-bore whistles, I’m sure there are a few more of those.
But – among those that are pure cylindrical bores, I’ve found that Thin/Water Weasel, Abell, Grinter off the top of my head are in tune across the octaves with no detectable adjustments. I have an old Burke wide-bore brass with no perturbations that’s absolutely perfect across two octaves. Best non-wooden whistle I own, alas he hasn’t made that design in over 20 years.
I make my whistles to need almost no adjustment in breath pressure between the octaves (just an adjustment in embouchure). About half my whistles, for me anyway, don’t need to be blown into tune at all. Most of the rest can easily be blown into tune, and about one in ten are a little out of tune and can’t be blown into tune comfortably.
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Modelling suggests that a whistle with a narrow window can be in tune, or even have a sharp second octave, with a purely cylindrical bore.
Interesting about the narrow window suggestion, but modelling is a different beast to actually making one.
Chas, are you a maker then? if so how on Earth do you get both octaves in tune? is these some kind of formula? window sizes, hole placement/ size ratios to go buy? I actually made many PVC whistles experimenting with every attribute I could think of, even different size bores but never got close to intune intonation, Yes you can blow in tune by blasting a rediculous air but thats not a comfortable way to play though, and the shrill!!! 
I’m acquiring your #72 in Pearwood from IFS. Blayne played it a bit for me and the tone and intonation are both lovely. I could hear how easily it went into the 2nd octave. I’m looking forward to playing it.
Cylindrical whistles tend to be in tune across three octaves without bore modification. The same applies to end-blown flutes, and flutes with the stopper hard up against the blowhole. If you modify the bore you’re doing it for some other reason.
I never found the recipie to make a cylindrical bore whistle in tune in both octaves let alone 3 octaves! 
Depending on what counts as a “perturbed bore,” there are lots of makers that do this, actually. Goldie, Kerry, Karavaev, Mazur, Dixon, Lofgren, and several other popular brands have a “pinch” in the head, right after the window. My understanding is that this significantly sharpens the second octave.
(Also, I don’t think Burkes have any bore variations - maybe the low ones do? At any rate, I don’t think the high ones do.)
Matter of opinion, I suppose. I wouldn’t call Abell whistles perfectly in tune across both octaves. They DO have slightly flat second octaves - though perhaps not flat enough to bother most people.
Even McManus whistles, which I like better than Abell (despite their similarity), have slightly flat second octaves.
Personal experience militates against this conclusion. MOST cylindrical whistles are at least slightly flat in the second octave, and they need to be deliberately under-blown in the first octave and over-blown in the second to play in tune - and even then, they sometimes can’t play perfectly in tune (certain notes will be 10 cents flat or so).
That said, some narrow bore/thin-walled whistles have this problem to such a small extent that it basically isn’t noticeable, in my opinion.
Yes, and in fact, this must be the case, because I remember I used to have a low D Susato, and it was perfectly cylindrical with an annoyingly sharp second octave. Impossible to play it flat enough.
But I’ve never encountered this on a high D whistle with no taper/perturbations.
Who even makes a conical bore, high or low D? I’ve heard that Copeland used to, but I’m unaware of any others. Clarke, I guess.
I think the key observation here is that on whistles, pitch and volume are intrinsically linked, such that playing louder requires higher air flow which also raises pitch. Combine that with the fact that the air flow needs to increase speed to jump up to the second octave, and you have a situation in which the second octave notes are naturally both relatively louder and relatively higher pitched than the lower octave notes. This effect can offset any second octave flattening that might occur due to the bore profile.
Flutes don’t have this limitation, because the players lip embouchure can be tightened to speed up the air without increasing the flow volume. This makes it relatively easy to play very loud in the bottom register and very quietly in the upper one, if you want to.
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Lets keep this to cylindrical whistles. Talking conical v’s cylindrical opens all sorts of cans of worms and somewhat muddys the waters
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My bad, I assumed you brought it up because you like conical bores instead. Ignore me
At the risk of boring (or annoying) everyone, I’d like dig in a bit deeper into what is going on here.
Let’s just focus on the note B for now. In the bottom octave, the first open tone hole is generally large enough to acoustically terminate the bore, so the whistle behaves like a short tube cut off at that point. However, this is not necessarily true for the second octave B, because higher frequency waves perceive the open tone hole lattice further down the bore differently to low frequency waves. To them, the tube is not necessarily terminated at the same length.
If you make the holes big enough relative to the bore diameter, they will terminate the bore for both. However, if they are not big enough, or if the wall thickness is high, giving them a high chimney height, they will not terminate the bore for the second octave, and you will perceive flattening.
When using PVC for a high D whistle, I think you are in this high chimney height territory. Using thin wall brass tubing probably is not in that territory, depending on tone hole size.
One reason I think you see bore perturbations in low D whistles more than high Ds is because the bore diameter is larger, which means that the tone holes would have to be huge and ergonomically problematic in order to fully terminate the bore. Hence, in their second octave the open tone hole lattice of a low D whistle is felt by the wave and flattening occurs.
An upper bore constriction can solve this because it can be placed in a location that is a node for the higher frequency waves, but not for the lower frequency waves. Hence it can have a different sharpening effect on each.
So taking into account my previous message, it should be clear why a whistle can be either flat or sharp in the second octave depending on the wall thickness and the tone hole size relative to the bore diameter, even for a completely cylindrical bore.
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Morneaux, Swayne, Carbony, Thornton, Cooperman, Clarke. That’s every current maker of conical whistles I’m aware of.
Sure, but the degree of this effect is pretty drastically different depending on which whistle you’re looking at. Some of them have a much bigger octave differential than others.
But even the thin-walled whistles can have flat high Bs, in my experience. My Feadog was that way, I remember. So having thin walls doesn’t fix the issue entirely (not that you said it did - just pointing this out).
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Yes, indeed the sharpening effect varies greatly depending on the whistle head design.
And yes, a thin walled brass whistle can still be flat in the second octave if the tone hole sizes are such that they don’t terminate the bore for those frequencies.
All these things, and more, need to be balanced in the design. Different makers have different preferences, so we end up with many different whistles.
Oh, and you can add Shaw to the conical bore list. And although we are not supposed to be straying away from cylindrical bores, I think all these same issues apply equally well there. The conical bores are generally not uniform cones, and they too have nonlinearities in the cross sectional area of the head bore to address the same problems.
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Hi, greetings, hanmade whistle maker here from Chile… I apply a kind of undercut with dremel round tips (or sometimes a number 11 scalpel) to the inner part of the tone holes, i learnt this by watching another flute maker do that to raise the second octave intonation of every note acording on how much is required, until now it seems to work pretty fine… the problem, it works mostly for thick wall tubes, above 1 mm thick walls at least
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