AAARRRRGGGHH! I got A C Generation from the Whistleshop today. It was a good one, too. sigh… was. 
I was all set to remove the head and go buy a tube to make a C# body. I used a lighter at first, trying to melt the glue, and waited until it started smoking and tried to remove the head. Alas, it wouldn’t budge. So I went back in the garage and borrowed a little mini blowtorch from one of the technicians. It heated the whistle up very quickly with its intense little blue flame. Smoke started almost right away. I turned the whistle around to ensure even heat distribution and suddenly the head started melting. I should have left well enough alone but nooo. I pulled it off and now it’s warped and won’t go back on. Crap. 
Try imersing it headfirst in hot water next time. Grasp the whistle using some cloth while it’s still hot, and twist the head off. It should make a “plop” sound when the glue breaks off. I used a glass of water heated almost but not quite to boiling point in a microwave oven.
Good one, Montana! 
Wow! Jerry Freeman told me to just use hot but not boiling water.
Do you use a sledgehammer to swat flies? 
Edited: Rats, Glauber beat me to the punch!
Hi, Paul.
Thank you for doing this bit of R&D. I seem to recall, someone had posted something about using a flame to heat a C Generation tube, and I thought, “Sounds like a long shot, but worth a try.” You’ve made a noble sacrifice on behalf of tweakers the world over.
Best wishes,
Jerry
OUCH! Tough croud!!! 
LOL! I knew I was going to get it! 
Well, at least it wasn’t a total waste. The tube of the whistle is all black and rainbow colored at the top end now.
And i bet it plays better than it did when you first got it.
Ahhh… life’s little lessons… 
… um… I mean… Gee, Paul, that’s …um… sad…
Jerry! If Paul asks to even look at my whistles, smack his hand, OK?
This sounds like another job for SuperMack.
I was thinking the same thing, Wombat. I just have to save up a little money. I’m tapped out because among other things I just wired the $$$ to Andreas Rogge in Germany for my Uilleann Pipes yesterday.
Oh well Paul, just put it on the backburner ..oops, I shouldn’t have said that.
I didn’t mean to start a flaming thread! Sorry
Hi, Montana.
Someone told me not to use boiling water, and I’ve been passing that information along out of an abundance of caution.
However, as a practical matter, I have to remove the heads from 20 or 30 D Generations in a batch, so I use a pot of water on the stove. Sometimes they’re harder to get off and I keep increasing the heat of the water until they come off readily, which means the water is just barely boiling by the time the whistleheads are coming off properly. Barely boiling is 212 degrees F, just the same as vigorous boiling, so boiling is boiling.
Thinking the thing through, it shouldn’t cause any harm to use boiling water because the whistleheads are made of thermoplastic. A thermoplastic can be melted and cooled again without damage. Boiling water isn’t hot enough to melt the plastic, so it shouldn’t affect it in any way. I have, incidentally, melted bits of whistlehead plastic to weld patches to fill holes in dinged up whistleheads. It hardens again just like normal.
Best wishes,
Jerry
Wow, whistlehead skin grafting. Cool.
The only concern I can think of with the hot/boiling water treatment is to be careful not to pour the water on yourself when you remove the whistle. A little bit of water will get trapped in the cavity below the windway. And a little bit of boiling water will get your attention pretty darn quickly in the right circumstances.
Paul, it would have worked with a D, I am sure. C Generation heads are the hardest to get off. Very annoying.
Paul, you might want to do as Jerry does—use a Waltons instead.
I used the hot water in a tea cup trick to try and remove an Oak head. I set it in the cup head down and went to do something for a few minutes. When I came back it had a 45 degree bend in the mouth piece. I will hopefully get on the July list for a white cap. Learning is tough.
Ron
I’ll definitely approach this differently next time. Well, for the completion of this project I went ahead and ordered a whitecap head from Mack. He says it will fit my brazed Gen barrell as well as the C# tube that I’m going to make.
I’ve never left a whistlehead resting in hot water. I’ve always held the whistle body and placed the whistlehead in the water without allowing it to touch the sides or bottom of the pot out of concern that the weight or the extra heat at the bottom of the pot might spoil it somehow.
Today, I’ve had something of a breakthrough.
The kind folks at www.bigwhistle.co.uk have ordered tweaked Generation complete sets in brass and nickel and I’ve been determined to supply them with honest-to-gosh Generation C tweaked whistles as part of the sets. Despite the legendary difficulties removing C Generation whistleheads, I’ve remained committed to finding a way to do it successfully and consistantly.
Today, I did succeed in removing two, key of C nickel Generation whistleheads without damage. I’m inclined to think nickel heads might be easier to remove than brass because of the slipperiness of nickel; however, these C whistleheads were very tight.
Here’s what I did:
I brought a pot of water to boil on the stove. I held the whistlehead in the water, without allowing it to touch the sides or bottom of the pot, for what seemed like an unusually long time. I lifted the whistlehead out of the water and, holding it in a terrycloth towel while holding the barrel in my bare hand, twisted as strongly as I could. Nothing happened, which didn’t surprise me.
Then I repeated the procedure, again holding the whistlehead in the boiling water for a long time (one minute, maybe?). The idea was to bring the plastic and the glue and metal inside up to the temperature of the water and hold it there for a little while. Then let it cool again so the components can shrink again and hopefully loosen things up a bit due to the different rates of expansion/contraction of the different materials involved.
After the second time, the whistlehead moved, although with difficulty, when I twisted as strongly as I could with my hands.
Then I repeated the process again, and the whistlehead moved more easily, but became stuck again when it cooled. Repeating the heating process several times and working quickly so I was twisting the whistlehead when it was as hot as possible worked well on both whistles and the whistleheads came off just fine.
Eventually, I’ll try this on some brass C Generations, and we’ll see if it works as well. Wish me luck!
Best wishes,
Jerry