I tend to buy boxes of Feadogs when teaching beginner whistle classes (free whistle with the class!), but it looks like I’ll need to move to either Gens or Sweetones…unless someone else has a good option you can buy in bulk, at a reasonable rate, with good quality. Received this in email this morning:
8 THE WESTWAY CENTRE • BALLYMOUNT AVENUE • DUBLIN 12 • IRELAND TEL: +353 1 456 9533 www.feadog.ie
Company Announcement December '25
The Directors of Feadog Teoranta have announced that they are going to retire from their business and production will cease from mid-January 2026.
The company started in 1978 and in the following 45+ years the business grew
steadily — supplying the Irish market and more than 20 export markets.
We are proud to have produced an Irish made whistle and thank you - our distributors, retailers and personal customers - for your wonderful support over the years.
Our best wishes to you all for the future.
The Directors
A. McCULLOUGH, L.E. McCULLOUGH,
V.A.T NO. IE 4813216Q • REGISTERED IN IRELAND NO. 119848
Feadóg probably have some stock to keep you going, that’s my gues anyway.
I would suggest you look into Oak, they don’t seem to have a web presence outside retailers but last time I looked they were ‘made in the US’ again. That alone would save you hassle and tariffs and all that.
I would personally avoid Sweetones or Clares but ymmv. And there’s always Aliexpress for bulk Feadóg lookalikes.
I had an Oak ages ago…probably in the late 80s. It was a nice, solid whistle if I recall correctly. I seem to recall preferring it to the Gens of the day. I’ve got enough Feadog stock to keep me going a couple years right now, but I’ll definitely look into the Oak when I need it. I just assumed Feadogs would be around forever.
These tariffs are a pain! I ordered a Thompson flute about 6 months before he closed his books and now it’s going to cost a goodly amount more when it’s finished thanks to tariffs.
I’d imagine the explosion of cheap whistles offered for sale there, on Amazon, etc. has impacted sales. Margins can’t be particularly high as-is, and now everyone and their mother is selling whistles online.
A good few students of mine played Feadógs, no doubt influenced in part by the fact that a bright pink/blue/red/green whistle is pretty appealing to a small child. Decent for the price, I’d agree that I prefer them over Clarke’s offerings.
Well that’s a drag, but part of a general market trend of whistle makers under serious financial pressures, I guess. Good news: I see Alba is restarting production at a slightly shifted level. Setanta’s website is gone. I haven’t seen any whistle makers who stalled or stopped over the last few years have a return apart from Alba. Nick Metcalf alters whistle designs often but seems to keep on steadily.
I read a post by Stacy where she said that someone is being trained to take over Alba production when she is no longer able. I’m curious how the design may change or if there could be some new offerings by Alba.
That’s quite sad news. I remember getting force-fed Feadog whistles in fourth class, as we had a band we all had to join, my first 5 whistles were Feadogs if I remember right. Sure lots of people have also started out on them.
Generations are better whistles in my opinion but no doubt there’ll be a Feadog-shaped void for a long time!
I wonder if 3D printed whistle heads will soon take over from the moulded plastic whistle heads we all grew up with? And could something like a impending change in technology be the impetus for older companies to suddenly decide it’s time to get out of the game?
In theory, moulded plastic heads should be very cheap to make, but as we have so often seen over the years, it’s not all plain sailing. I have a good supply of duds that have never played well, as well as a number that I have tweaked to solve the problems they came with, and which now play very well. So near and yet so far!
And I wonder if companies that employ 3D printing as a technology will also go through periods when just everything seems to go wrong? Some little change in the composition of the filament suddenly has all the ramps drooping, wind ways caving in, sockets jamming, etc, etc.
I’m thinking that at least reacting to problems might be easier under 3D printing than under plastic moulding. Getting and keeping the moulds “just right” has clearly challenged even the big manufacturers like Generation. Whereas tweaking 3D printing would be more of a software issue than having to make new sets of moulds. Or am I wrong?
Do we know if any commercial makers are employing 3D printing yet? Anyone have any experience of a successfully printed whistle to report?
Well, it was predicted years ago the world would be flooded with cheap, well playing whistles within six months and world peace would break out. Whatever became of that? Oh, hang on..
There was a Dutch crowd, deQuelery, turning these out seven or eight years ago. At the time they stated it took 24 hours to print a low whistle head in sufficient resolution.
Intuitively, I would not expect 3D printing to have the accuracy or consistency of plastic moulding, nor be as cheap for masa production. But I don’t actually do either myself. So, I asked Google’s AI what it thought. Here is what it said (and of course, this doesn’t mean that its necessarily true!).
For accuracy, injection molding generally beats 3D printing** for tight tolerances, part-to-part consistency, and smooth finishes**, especially in high volumes, thanks to its tooling and process. However, advanced 3D printing (like SLA/DLP/PµSL) offers incredible detail and small-scale precision for prototypes, though achieving production-level finishes often needs post-processing (sanding, etc.). Molding is best for mass production with consistent quality; 3D printing excels in rapid iteration and complexity where layer lines are less critical or can be removed.
Yeah, I’d agree that injection moulding SHOULD give the better results, especially in terms of smoothness, but it leaves me wondering why the whistle industry has struggled so over the years. Perhaps the economics of cheap whistle making means they can’t afford the time and effort required to get everything right.
I agree too. I think 3D printing can free the imagination to print shapes that are very difficultg to mold. E.g you dont have to worry about how you get the whistle out of the mold. Some printing methods have their own constraints. Like not being able to print too much overhang with fdm filament printers. For low quantities there might be a niche for designs that cant be molded (especially if someone comes up with a genuinely superiordesign that cant be molded). There is also a much lower barrier to entry. You can get set up for basic 3D printing for hundreds of dollars, whereas injection molding costs hundreds of thousands for a high volume set up.
3d printing you are looking at around half an hour cycle time (very rough estimate, but expect in the order of dozens per day) Injection molding can pump out in the order of 5 thousand per hour. I would expect that any large scale operation would be tuning their designs with 3D printed prototypes before paying for moderate capacity tooling and then they are waiting for a significant number of sales to break even, but over the life of the tool the tooling cost would be insignificant if they are successful in the market. But they are pretty stuck with that design. 3d printers might break even much much sooner, if it can be proven there is a sufficient market for them, and they can update the design in software without any new overhead (e.g a family of different keys from the same machine), but they wont be able to hit anything like the scale of injection molding.
Imagine you are trying to print a treble D whistle head in the modern style where the windway isn’t flat across like in the Good Old Days, but curves to follow the bore of the main tube. And tapers down from say nearly 2mm high at the blowing end down to about 1.3mm at the opening into the window.
We old-fashioned “fabricators” would make the head in 3 sections - its body or “shell”, its plug and a cover. But I imagine a 3D Printing person would hope to print it in one piece. The difficulty I imagine is how do you clean up any roughness left in the windway? It’s so thin that it would be difficult to find a file that would fit, but because it’s curved across, you’d also need a curved file that matched the bore!
But maybe I’m imagining problems where they don’t exist. I’m good at that!
Hmmm, my historical tendencies have just kicked in…
It would seem to be a shame to have Ireland’s first large-scale whistle-making company slip into obscurity without gathering more of their history than the scant details on their website offer. And I suppose even that will disappear when the company closes and the site comes down.
So perhaps if anyone knows the people involved, it could be good to urge them to capture their history before it slips away. I’m thinking of taking lots of images of the workplace, and either publishing them or lodging them with some long term archival body.
Ditto their workshop drawings, business records etc. Rather than shredding them!
And perhaps someone at the trad music school in Limerick is looking for a Master’s thesis topic? How about this one?
Hey Terry, I think you would have a good crack at it with a filamment printer in a material that can be chemically polished. With resin printing you would get a pretty good finish right off the bat ( with the standard cleaning ) and the modern resin printers would be able to do a pretty reasonable batch (for a small scale production) in not that long. Laser sintering with chemical smoothing would also work well I think. I guess you are almost unlimited in the shape you can create with of the later two, more limited with filament printing but my guess is it is probably possilbe to do it in one go, and that is probably the most accessible to a beginer. I reckon you could also print a curved 1mm paddlepop stick and wrap it with sand paper to clean up the windway. I’ll probably have a go at it now that you’ve sparked my curiousity
Very good idea regarding collecting the history of Feadog now.
At one point, I was working on a low whistle head. It had a complex windway shape, like those found on recorders. I stopped the experiments before achieving a final result, simply because I ran out of time to pursue it. Some whistle makers told me it wouldn’t work, but the first register was very good, unlike the second. I used up a lot of plastic, and only later, after the fact, did I realize that the corrections I was making in CAD weren’t actually reflected in the parameters of the printed heads due to incorrect print settings.
I can’t claim that a whistle of this design will sound good in all registers, but perhaps someone might want to experiment with it further.
Perhaps you’re right. In this experimental design, I simply asked a “naive question”: what if? Some whistle makers said it wouldn’t produce any sound at all, but the sound that did come out was quite promising. I didn’t fully pursue this idea due to my incomplete understanding of print settings at the time, and I never tried making other modifications — like using a 30-degree angle combined with a curved windway, or implementing a windway with a variable vertical cross-section in its central part that is split in two, etc. If this thing can’t be made to work in any iteration, then so be it. But if it can, that would be great, because at the scale of a low whistle, this headjoint prints cleanly and looks very interesting.
Is there a reason that you think the blade needs to be perpendicular to the bore Tunborough? After all, on a flute it is parallel to the bore, depending on the embouchure hole shape. For a round or oval embouchure hole the splitting edge is at various angles to the bore depending on how you blow it.
I find some of these non-intuitive designs quite interesting. New construction technologies, like 3D printing, allow you to think outside the box a bit and question some fundamental assumptions.
I share Tunborough’s concerns. Imagine you are blowing through the windway and we are in that part of the cycle where a returning positive pressure front is making its way up the tube, intending to grab your jet and fling it out the window.
In the normal arrangement the wave front arrives simultaneously across the bottom of the ramp and whooshes the jet upwards.
But if the blade is at an angle, one side of the front arrives first, and I imagine largely exhausts through that side. So it doesn’t get the benefit of the full width.
