For those of you who love wood, check out this site:
http://woodfinder.com/woods/woodindex.php
Pictures and data on LOTS of interesting and beautiful woods plus links to suppliers if you’re into woodworking.
I wonder which is the lightest of the stable woods. Boxwood is light but warps.
Is it Cooktown Ironwood?
Paul, you are torturing me further… I thought I had managed to get away from there for a couple of days… 
Say… have you ever worked with Osage Orange? Extremely hard, I think… tends to dull tools… gorgeous yellow gold color… makes great fenceposts, doesn’t rot, and will often sprout from the posts!! I don’t have a clue how it would be for whistles, except beautiful. I can get some if you are interested.
Lignum Vitae looks nice and sounds like it has good properties for use in a musical instrument. Have you ever made a whistle out of this wood Paul?
-Brett
Ironwood (1.1) has a very close specific Gravity to Blackwood(1.2). In other words, it is not a light wood.
Tat is a nice page Paul, I am enjoying it very much.
I had a set of pipes made out of lignum vitae. Hard, hard wood. However, it will split if not properly aged/seasoned. Looks like milk chocolate. Has a good sound.
Hey Paul, have you worked with ebony? If so, how does it behave?
Howdy,
Lignum vitae has a specific gravity up to 1.37, which is denser than blackwood. Any wood with a specific gravity over 1.0 sinks in water. Dense stuff.
Lignum vitae also has natual oils which don’t dry out, so you shouldn’t need to oil it. The trick is that glue doesn’t stick to it very well for the same reason.
I’ve got a big slab of lignum vitae that’s been seasoning for the last ten years. One of these days when I’ve saved enough pennies, I’m going to cut a piece off and send it to one of you whistle makin’ folk and have a really nice whistle made.
Best,
Dave
Osage Orange-- this wood is sort of stringy, but I made one whistle out of it and it came out quite nice. I wouldn’t mind trying it again.
Lignum Vitae-- a customer sent me some pieces of this wood once in hopes of having a whistle made from it. Unfortunately, once I turned the square pieces into rough-sized cylinders for his whistle, they started cracking severely and I had to abandon the project. It may have been the particular wood though:
Glenn Schultz made a couple from this wood which came out fine.
This is the heaviest wood in the world. It’s quite oily naturally and I’m told that they used to make main propellor shaft bearings for submarines out of it! I worried a bit about being able to glue the oily wood, but Glenn apparently had no troubles there.
Ebony-- there are many types and a lot of it is notoriously prone to cracking. I made a few whistles from Mun Ebony which came out very nicely, and I’ve also used Macassar Ebony, which also worked well. In fact, I just bought a nice chunk of Macassar which I’ll be sawing into blanks soon and starting to play with. The luthier I got it from says he’s had it sitting in his shop for several years, so it should be fairly dry. Note that this is more of a dark brown than a pitch-black wood like the name Ebony usually conjures up.
Lignum vitae was also used as bearings for propellor shafts on steamers as well as being used for the cogs in precision clocks. It is an industrial grade material - I have heard that it kills tools and the oil is not good for people. Still, it’s like the chrome molly of wood - that has to have some attraction 
Thanks for the info on ebony Paul.
Howdy,
Minor nitpick - it was the bearings that supported the shaft, and not the shaft itself.
Best,
Dave
Ever made a whistle from narra?
Thanks Dave-- that’s what I meant. I’ll fix it.
No, never tried that one. The site describes the texture as “fine to moderately coarse” and that coarse end of the spectrum could be a problem. Pretty stuff though.
I’m a Woodfinder fan as well. I’ve worked with a variety of woods (in boatbuilding and sculpture). I favor sustainable native wood over tropical hardwoods. Osage orange has some good properties as do locust and persimmon. Persimmon is related to ebony and some luthiers have experimented with it. Black locust is very dense and dimensionally stable, it also seems to be very resonant, it has been used to make marimbas and is prized in boatbuilding. I think it might make a good whistle. It has a rich waxy appearance, sometimes greenish, can look a bit like teak. I have some.
Doug
Aren’t the locust woods pretty stringy in texture? I’d be curious to give it a try.
For domestic, non-endangered woods, you can’t go wrong with figured maples: birdseye and tiger are wonderful. Sometimes you find pieces that have some of each figure. I don’t stain wood as a rule, but on figured maples a bit of a honey aniline dye really makes the grain pop out even more without looking phony.
I agree with Paul about maple. It’s also cheap enough that one can be picky about figure. I’ll have to try the dye trick; the oil I use darkens it a bit too much, so dye with a clear wax topcoat might be nice.
Lignum Vitae is a favourite wood of mine, but I just made a sad discovery: after sanding a carving mallet on the lathe on Thursday, I’m reacting to the Lignum Vitae dust, from the elbows down. This is a first for me; my only other sensitivities are to xylene and acetone (and rap music). I’ll just have to get some Cooktown Ironwood!
preferably in tooter form, with McGee stamped on it
You can get “real” wood dyes from sources like Woodcraft.com . The one I use for a natural looking dye job was from Bartley Collection. However, if you want to go wild and crazy, you can simply use Rit fabric dye which is available just about anywhere:
This was not for a whistle, but just for fun.
Not all ironwoods are Cooktown Ironwood just as
not all lancewoods are Red Lancewood.
Perhaps an Australian maker might like to comment ?
I´ve got a couple of chinese whistle type instrument. They´re made of bamboo. They sound excellent and the wood is very hard and durable. The natural shape of the tube also make it a very good choice for all type of flute making.