Making wooden whistles - a few questions

Whistle
1

Hi all

Over the years I’ve made various instruments. I made acoustic and electric guitars mostly but also a carved top and back mandolin, a handful of bodhrans and believe it or not an Anglo Saxon lyre. I’ve been playing whistle for years and owned examples from lots of well known makers. Not sure what has put me off making them but possibly because I’ve never ventured in to the world of woodwind as a maker. But I’ve given up on making stringed instruments and sold most of my specialist tools for that. I still want to “make” though. And so I’m coming round to the idea of making whistles.

To be clear I only want to make wooden or maybe Delrin whistles. I don’t want to make low whistles (yet) and I want to make them two piece tunable. I have a wood turning lathe so I have some experience in that respect

I’m currently researching engineering/metalworking lathes as I want the process to be precise and repeatable (which I don’t think I’m skilled enough with the woodturning lathe to be able to do). For those that don’t know these are very expensive pieces of kit and I don’t want to make a terrible mistake buying the wrong one at the outset.

So…for those of you in the know what are the critical features of such a lathe for whistle making? Not going to be doing anything else with it so particular engineering aspects of it are of no interest to me. Can someone recommend what distance between centres would be suitable? I’ve found ones that have 400mm between centres but I suspect that might be too short to allow the blank to be bored using a gun drill. Or for two piece whistles would I cut the spindle blank in two before boring?

Thanks in advance. Oh and any other pieces of advice would be most welcome

Gerry

2

I’ve been through the stage you are at now and can share some reflections and suggestions, but I suspect they are probably not what you are really hoping to hear.

You definitely will want a metal lathe if you get into this serioiusly, even though most of the time you will be working with wood. You’ll use it all the time, and the money you spent on it will soon seem relatively insignificant compared to the cost of all the other tools you’ll need and time you’ll spend. :smiling_imp:

As for size, the bigger the better. The limit is often not the cost of the machine, but the challenge of moving it to its location in your workshop, because they quickly become really heavy.

I make a variety of different flutes and whistles and have been very happy with the old WW2 Sheldon Lathe I bought used. It only cost me about $1k to buy, and about 50% of that again to move, and I had to do some cleanup, but it can do everything I need, and I have never looked back. It has a 56 inch bed, and a wide (~1.5 inch) bore inside the head spindle. The wide head spindle bore is really important for the way I work because it allows me to insert billets (which I turn into cylinders at an early stage) inside the head spindle, hence greatly increasing the usable bed length for gun drilling longer sections. Head spindle bore is one of those easily overlooked features that will greatly impact your experience! The small lathes tend to come with much too small head spindle bores.

I love this lathe, but a lathe like this weighs well over half a ton and was difficult, and expensive, and more than a little scary, to move the first time because I hadn’t anticipated quite what I was getting into. I have since moved house and figured out how to move it all by myself, using an engine hoist, a utility trailer, and a whole lot of ingenuity, but it was more than a little stressful. So you need good access to your workshop and smooth floors. You won’t be carrying this down a flight of wooden stairs into your basement! So definitely consider the cost and logistics of these aspects before committing to a purchase.

Even with plenty of bed length, I do tend to try to work with short pieces of wood when possible. They are easier to ream (if you are making conical bore instruments), short reamers are easier to make, gun drills don’t wander so far off center, it is more efficient in terms of wood usage because it is harder to find defect-free long sections, etc. But I would still go for the biggest (longest bed, widest head spindle bore) lathe you can possibly manage. You won’t regret it, at least not until you move house. It’ll be able to do everything a smaller lathe can do, and most things better, and will not be nearly so limiting. And importantly, you’ll enjoy using it. So take the kind of lathe you’ve been imagining, double that size, and add a bit. :smiling_imp:

You’ll probably also end up wanting to get a milling machine, for accurately cutting tone holes, window, windway, etc, and for making reamers if you want to work on conical bore instruments. But here I have found that a relatively small milling machine works just fine. I use a G0704 mill from Grizzly, and it has been very good for all aspects of my work, in metal and wood. It is of a size and weight that allows it to be moved into place in parts, and assembled in place, using human power only (with the help of a couple of friends).

3

As to the question of what is the minimum bed length you could get away with, that depends on a lot of factors, including the following:

  • What is the longest section you will work with? For example, a two part low F whistle will typically have a body section that is about 15 inches long. To turn the outside of this you will need to mount it between centers and will need a lathe with usable bed length larger than 15 plus the length of both centers. On my lathe the tailstock center takes up about 4 inches. A headstock center takes a bit less, but is held in a 3-jaw chuck which takes up 4 or 5 inches. So you are looking at a minimum of 15 + 4 + 5 = 24 inches, just for turning the outside, and this is usable bed length which is generally less than nominal bed length.
  • How will you hold your gun drills? I mount my gun drills in a 5C collet holder held in a milling attachment mounted on the lathe tool post, and advance it using the carriage controls. The insertable part of the gun drill is at least as long as the billet to be drilled. So in the example above, at least 15 inches, and probably a few extra inches. Then there is the base of the drill and the bed space occupied by the milling attachment, carriage etc. This vastly increases the bed length requirements above, unless you can hold the billet inside the head spindle, or you can run the gun drill through the tail stock (which imposes constraints on tail stock dimensions and features), or hold it by hand.
  • How does the listed bed length for your lathe relate to usable bed length? In my case, the lathe has a nominal 56" bed, but a large amount of that is occupied by the head stock, carriage, and tail stock, some or all of which need to be considered depending on the job you are doing and the way you are doing it.
4

I’m happy to hear all of your advice and I’m thankful you took the time to give it. No need to sugar coat anything.

I have a budget of maybe £1500 for a lathe and I’m currently looking at a Myford one which is reasonably close by - from looking at videos on Youtube of it the tailstock and motor can be removed to lighten it and allow it to be moved by a couple of people. I’ll simply have to get what I can get and learn to use it properly. I’m pretty adept with a drill press from the many guitars etc I’ve built and I’ve made lots of jigs to simplify processes and make them accurate. That’ll be my approach to cutting tone holes. Maybe a milling machine down the line but the lathe will get me going.

I’m really not going to be making anything much bigger than a D whistle so there is that.

5

I was in my original post looking at some of the Chinese lathes but in my research today that has become a hard “No”. The Myford ML7 that I’m looking at now has a 42" bed length. To use the tool post as a holder for the gun drill I’d imagine the tailstock would be removed in a Myford ML7.

6

I’ve heard reports of several professional flute makers using Myford Super 7 lathes. Supposedly, they are very nice. In the US (where I am) they are quite rare though, and parts are expensive. But if you are in the UK, that would be a great way to go. You should look this up, but I believe that, capacity wise, the Super 7 is similar to the ML7, so there should be no problem there. But I do seem to remember reading somewhere that the Super 7 was far superior to the ML7 (which it replaced) in its high speed performance. This could be critical for someone working with narrow diameter, wooden parts, which will definitely require high spindle speeds. If I were you, I’d look into that before purchasing.

7

That sounds like good advice! The one I’m looking at is an ML7-R which I believe uses some of the parts of the Super 7. Just found a maker turning a chanter for Northumbrian smallpipes using an ML7 so it seems to be doable for narrower pieces.

8

That sounds like it could be perfect. I found the following information about the ML7-R online:

Although called an ML7 - and you would therefore expect it to be a development of, or directly related to, the original machine of that name - it was actually a non-power cross feed Super 7, but without a clutch and fitted with ML7 cross and top slides. It was designed to fit below the Super 7 in place of the ML7 and allowed a rationalisation of production around just one design of bed, headstock and tailstock.

I doubt you would have use for a power cross feed for whistle making, so it may effectively be a Super 7. I think flute maker Casey Burns uses a Myford Super 7, and if memory serves, so does Rod Cameron. So I’m sure this would more than satisfy your needs, and would continue to give you pleasure if you extend the range of instruments you work on.

I should also add that most makers seem to not hold their gun drills the way I do, in a carriage-mounted milling attachment, but instead either manage them via the tailstock, advancing by hand, or use some similar approach. I think this choice is driven by the inability to fit the billet inside the headstock, and the resulting shortage of bed length. But when the billet is held outside of the head spindle you will likely need a steady rest. When purchasing the lathe try to get as many accessories as possible thrown in. If you get just the lathe and have to buy all the necessary accessories it can double the overall cost.

9

I also use the carriage-mounted approach for gun-drilling, although I can also mount them in the tailstock chuck if needed, say for a quick job. My machine lathe is about 3ft (about 915mm) between centres, and I can hold billets up to 40mm in the chuck and inside the headstock spindle. I mostly use that machine for roughing, boring and reaming where the lower speeds and lots of grunt come in really handy. It also has a gearbox style speed change, and I make use of the hollow spindle for sucking up the noxious dust produced by some of the operations. I also have a similar length wood lathe, mostly used for sanding and polishing, and for fitting rings, and a shorter “desktop” CNC lathe for automated exterior profiling. But all of that is because I mostly make flutes, though low whistles are going to make big demands unless made in sections.

I haven’t done that much in whistle making, only a few treble D whistles to explore my own preferences in whistles. I did find the mill very good for milling the windways and ramp of the whistles (I know, a real whistlemaker would cut that with a few deft strokes of a very sharp chisel!), but it was surprising how much I had to lower the table (it’s a floor-mounted mill so that’s possible) to allow the rotary head to tilt up to the ramp slope angle. There are probably other and better ways to achieve the same thing, but its a reminder to think your way carefully through the whole process to make sure every box is ticked.

Feel free to come back with questions if I’ve managed to confuse the issue further!

10

Thanks for the replies Paddler and Terry. The ML7-R looks to be a good prospect. It’ll probably be after Christmas now before there’s any negotiation with the seller of the one reasonably local to me. They don’t seem to be a quick sell so hopefully it’ll still be available.

Terry - one or two things occur to me if you don’t mind me asking. Is there an issue with marring the wood when it’s gripped by the chuck or is that section cut off at a later point in the process as waste? Also - it is safe to assume that the precision of a metal working lathe allows for the construction of instruments in sections without any alignment issues when the instrument is assembled?

11

When gun drilling or reaming the bore in unfinished billets, marring isn’t a problem, but once past that stage you will be mounting the work on centers and/or on specially constructed mandrels which you will make on the lathe. I have a whole drawer full of steel mandrels I made for all the sections of all the instruments I make. This is critical for turning thin walled tubes. Without them you will have problems with chatter, and thin walled wooden tubes are very easy to crack or crush if you try gripping them directly.

As you get into this you’ll find that it is all about maintaining concentricity across the many phases of construction. Once you are clear about what that means, and the subtle ways it can be lost if you make incorrect choices or assumptions regarding work holding, you will find that the lathe has more than enough precision to make instruments in sections that piece together perfectly.

12

Back when I briefly made wooden whistles, I couldn’t afford a large enough machine lathe to do the bore drilling on, so I compromised.

I bought an extremely affordable very long wood late from Harbor Freight, and used that for my drilling. I bolted the lathe down to a workbench, and then manually fed the gundrill (attached to the tailstock) through the tube. This wasn’t a precise operation, and the gundrill would often wander a bit. But since they’re mostly self-centering, I would still have enough wood on either side of the bore (from a 12x1x1 wood blank) to turn down into a whistle.

I bought a 14"-between-centers machine mini lathe to do the outer bits after doing research on mini-lathe.com.

It wasn’t an ideal solution, but it worked for me and saved me some thousands of dollars.

13

Stupid question maybe - how do you secure the drilled tube to the mandrel to avoid it spinning whilst your turning the outside face down to its final size? Assuming we’re talking about a straight rather than tapered bore here. I’d imagine it might be somewhat easier to keep a tapered bore tube in place on a tapered mandrel. Or are there oversized caps at either end along the lines of a pen mandrel? You make the mandrels on the lathe? Don’t suppose you have a pic of one of them?!

Wanderer - I’m hoping to do most of the work on the metal work lathe. I have a small wood turning lathe I can use to dimension spindle blanks down to oversized cylinders but it wouldn’t be big enough to drill them as well.

14

Actually, that is a very good question. The problem with using any kind of taper is that it will very easily split the tube. My mandrels tend to have a step in them so that they apply pressure to the end grain, aligned with the axis of the lathe and bore, by virtue of being over sized at the ends. One end is held in the chuck and the other end on a center in the tailstock (the mandrel has a center hole). The part of the mandrel that goes inside the tube bore needs to be a good fit, and this can be achieved in a number of ways, one of which is to use a wrap of tape if the mandrel is slightly under size. I’ve heard of others using rubber O’rings on mandrels, but I haven’t found that to be necessary. If you take light cuts it is surprising how little resistance you need to prevent the work spinning on the mandrel.

15

I only grip the outside of the billet while boring and reaming, so it doesn’t matter if it mars the surface as that will be taken off in the outside profiling phase to come.

Also - it is safe to assume that the precision of a metal working lathe allows for the construction of instruments in sections without any alignment issues when the instrument is assembled?

Chucks are great for “quick and dirty” jobs, like boring and reaming, but I’d rather not trust one for precision jobs. If forced to remove something from the chuck to be put back later, I mark on the item where the label of the chuck is, so at least I put it back in the chuck in the same location.

Like Paddler, I do my later processes “between centres”. I use a wooden “drive” centre on the woodlathe, so it can be easily turned true again after jobs like facing off leaves marks on it. The tail centre is a “live” (rotating bearing) centre so as not to introduce drag or damage the bore if it grabs and slips.

On sections that are particularly at risk of splitting (eg the LH section of a flute that has a thin tenon at both ends), I leave the first few mm at the full diameter of the section until I get to the point I’m actually fitting the tenon to the relevant socket. And all the other sections are protected against splitting by having rings.

So, my order becomes (on flutes):
Cut square blanks to almost final length
Rough squares to round
Bore insides
Ream bores and sockets
Profile outsides (but leaving tenon tips oversize)
Face off to final lengths
Make and add rings
Rest till no movement detected or expected
Re-ream insides
Mill keyblocks (on keyed flutes)
Fit keys etc…
Fit tenons to sockets
Finish off, polish, oil etc…

So, your tasks will differ, being whistles and not flutes, but the same sort of logic can probably be applied.

A year or so ago, someone sent me a recently-made flute needing some work. Interestingly, the bore was not concentric with the outside, the bore being up to 2-3 mm off-centre in places. So clearly not everyone follows the same plan…

16

Thanks again guys for the info - this is all so helpful.

I know from my previous instrument building experiences that getting the process “down” is the key to it. I’m imagining it’s going to maybe take a year or more for me to refine all of the operations to a point where I’m happy with them. Certainly it took me longer than that with guitar building but I was truly starting from scratch then.

Another quick question if that’s ok. I’m specifically thinking about whistles here but is the drilling of the bore sufficient or is there a more refined reaming process after that. I can see that there is with flutes from Terry’s comments but I was wondering about this re whistles? Do you make the reamers on the lathe yourself? If so how?!

17

With a whistle you won’t need reamers unless you are doing a tapered bore. If you choose a gun drill of the correct diameter, that’s all you’ll need for the bore, and it will give you a better finish in the bore than a reamer will (at least that has been my experience). I can only imagine someone taking the trouble to make a reamer for a cylindrical bore instrument if they didn’t have access to a source for gun drills of various sizes. You can get small gun drills (pre-owned) for very reasonable prices, and if you are only making small whistles you can get a selection of sizes if you want to experiment with bore diameters. Reamer manufacturing is a lot of work, but a worthy skill to develop if you are thinking of branching out to tapered bores.

There is a great thread on reamer making:

https://forums.chiffandfipple.com/t/my-reamer-making-saga/102757/1

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I’ll offer a slightly different perspective with regards to reaming (or not) for wooden whistle making and say, “it depends”.

A good gun drill, properly used, CAN yield a very straight, smooth bore. OTH, there are a few ways things can go sideways, so to speak, leaving you with less than optimal results.

Also, keep in mind that if you gun drill the bore to its final diameter and then the wood moves - bending/ovaling - and it will move, then what are you going to do to get back to spec? You can’t gun drill it again, can you? I was taught not to try, so perhaps it’s possible but typically when I was told not to try something in the shop it was for safety reasons. I imagine you could try using the gun drill itself as a reamer and ream by hand, though I’m not sure how well that would work since I’ve never tried that either, as a proper reamer was always available. Geoffrey? Terry? Bueller? Ever tried hand reaming with a gun drill?

Anyway, to continue, if you want to make quality whistles, the seasoning and working of the wood in stages is critical. As such, a good (proven) plan would be:

  1. Purchase or cut billets.

  2. Season for years. Yeah, I get that you aren’t going to do this initially, which is all the more reason to plan for the wood to move a significant amount during and after production.

  3. Turn round (oversize)

  4. Gun drill (under size)

  5. Let rest for 6 mos or longer.

  6. Ream to final I.D. dimensions.

  7. Turn O.D. Closer to final to final dimension but not all the way.

  8. Let rest another 6 mos - year, re-reaming every 2-3 months. I personally would want the wood to have been through one full cycle of all four seasons where I live in the N.E. USA. 6 months might be sufficient in areas with less drastic temperature and humidity changes, but I can’t say that from direct knowledge, as my woodwind making was all done here in New England.

  9. Re-ream until the reamer isn’t removing additional wood from one 3 month period to the next.

  10. Polish bore as needed.

  11. Turn O.D. to final spec and continue production.

Seems time consuming and a lot of hassle, but if you want your whistles to stay straight and also not crack, you pay for that up front during production. Unfortunately most new makers rush the process and push out whistles (and flutes) that end up cracking and/or warping.

Point being, having and using reamers is quite handy, if you want to do things “right”. For cylindrical whistles you could probably find commercial reamers that would work for at least some of the whistles you’d make, no need to make your own to start.

19

That’s a fascinating take from two perspectives on the question of reaming. I’m going to look at that thread you’ve linked Geoffrey in great detail - thanks for that.

Loren - I agree with you on resting the tubes for a period of some months to make sure they’re stable. Most of the exotic and domestic timbers we have will be kiln dried but acclimatizing them to domestic conditions takes some time after that process. This is something I’ve had to be careful of in my previous instrument building endeavours. My initial plan is to buy some of the woods in relative bulk and put them away until I get round to using them. I have a massive chunk of boxwood (castelo not european) that is going to be what I use to learn on - probably 20+ whistles worth and it has been seasoning for maybe 5 years in my house. I live in NE Scotland so it never gets very dry. It gets pretty damp in the winter and slightly less damp in a good summer! But household conditions are probably somewhat drier if not by a massive amount (I live in an old Victorian granite/sandstone house). I should get a moisture meter for timber but I suspect you have to spend a fair chunk to get decent accuracy.

Btw - feels like I’m getting a free masterclass in making woodwind instruments here! Thanks all!

Next question - been scaring myself looking at the price of silver sheet metal! How thick should I be looking at? Is 0.5mm enough? I can see the lathe is going to be handy for making other tools of use in shaping the rings to precise dimensions

20

Loren’s advice on seasoning and explicitly addressing the inherent instability of wood is really important! It is not just a matter of having wood sitting around for years before using it. You should approach this as a multi-stage process, and anticipate that wood will move and needs time to settle after each and every stage.

I harvest, mill and season some of my own wood, which ultimately (after a ~10 year, multi-stage, process) ends up being cooked and then stabilized using vacuum resin infusion techniques. I turn to oversized cylinders and pilot drill (way under size) quite early in the seasoning process. I also acquired a stock of 40+ year old african blackwood that has been in this turned and pilot drilled state for decades. So I’ve had plenty of opportunity to observe the difference in movement patterns among parts made from these different materials and wood that has only been left to settle for a couple of years. I can attest to the message that all professional woodwind makers will tell you, which is that wood does in fact move … a lot!

I’ve gun drilled many billets that are already pilot bored and have sat (and perhaps warped) in that state for long periods. With some, the pilot bore and final bore were close in size. I’ve never had a problem. In fact, I would say that the gun drilling goes even smoother and quicker and straighter in that mode. However, your gun drilling setup does have to take into account the fact that the air blasting through the drill will go straight through the billet, and as such there will not be the same pressure build-up to force chips back towards the gun drill. The way I manage chip collection, this is actually an advantage, because, like Terry, I have part of my dust collection sucking air through the headstock spindle, and hence assisting the compressed air running through the gun drill (in the case that the billet is pilot bored already). The result is that the process is almost completely clean, which is certainly not the case when gun drilling a solid billet, no matter how you try to trap the returning shotgun blast of chips. I’ve never experienced even a slight problem with chip clearing or jamming of the gun drill this way. But one safety issue you should always keep in mind with gun drilling is that if there is a problem with chip clearing, the drill will heat up very quickly and bind inside the billet. For the size of gun drills you are using, the result will most likely be that the head of the gun drill will snap off inside the billet. Expensive, and smelly, but not necessarily dangerous (or safe!).

I have also used a gun drill for hand reaming on a few occasions, where the gun drill was held in a vice and billet is twisted by hand to shave small amounts of material. Somewhat surprisingly (to me) it kind of works, in a pinch. Better than expected, in fact, but I doubt you’d want to do it to remove the amount of material you typically would remove when reaming. I’ve done the same thing with reamers to gently re-ream the bore of antique flutes, and it is clear that a reamer is a lot more effective than a gun drill in this usage pattern.