ok…the lead fipple is now coated with acrylic clearcoat but i am not happy with the lead poison implications. i think i could carve a wooden fipple but what wood? i would like use a traditional wood. good idea…bad idea…?..any ideas!..what are the symptoms of lead poisoning anyway?
I do not think I would play a whistle with a lead fipple more than one time to hear what it sounded like. Than buy another whistle to play and just show off the one with the lead fipple for conversation.
I have 4 or 5 of these types of whistles with lead fipples. All are coated with clear nailpolish. Personally, the idea of a lead fipple doesn’t concern me and I play them with no effects.
According to the National Safety Council: “In adults, lead can increase blood pressure and cause fertility problems, nerve disorders, muscle and joint pain, irritability, and memory or concentration problems. It takes a significantly greater level of exposure to lead for adults than it does for kids to sustain adverse health effects.”
If you are concerned with the amount of exposure in a lead fipple, your doctor would be the best person to speak with.
Putting a wood fipple in the whistle would probably destory its sound qualities and definitely affect the antique value. I have to agree… just get another whistle.
I don’t know what the probability of harming yourself would be if you disturbed the lead or played the whistle untreated. Let’s suppose it’s very small. (I have no reason to believe that it is very small but that doesn’t matter for my argument.) The probability might be small, the damage you could do to yourself is very considerable.
Suppose you come to a party at my house and I offer you a drink. Actually you can choose your drink from 10,000 identical looking drinks I have an a table. Now I tell you that one and only one of the drinks has been laced with lethal amounts of a deadly but undetectable poison. Would it be rational to take a drink? Of course it wouldn’t be, unless you were dying of thirst. The chance of dying is only one in 10,000. But you could walk out of my house and buy a drink anywhere else without much trouble and without taking a comparable risk.
Buy yourself another whistle. They’re cheap enough.
Waiting for the symptoms and then stopping the cause, is just about to late.