Anyone know what’s up with McHaffie Whistles website? I’ve been getting an error everytime I go there. The url I have is: http://mcwhistles.com
I got the error also.
I’m pretty sure the site is down for good, the hosting company doesnt recognize the website anymore.
To cheer us up, here’s an early comment from Chiff about McHaffie:
McHaffies are lovely whistles, the sound is clear and pure, not to much chiff, switch between upper and lower octave is smooth and they are very well made and attractive. Well worth the small price John charges for them and worth the wait to get.
Thanks to the fact that criticizing whistles or whistle makers has never been accepted in these forums, that message was the last and only reply in the thread 
If that is the case, then, does anyone have accurate contact info for John?
John is a fantastic gentleman. he is very busy now making me a Low C (prototype), but I have always had success reaching him at the following email address:
I hope this works for you.
takecare
He is also McHaffie on this forum.
Some public information:
McHaffie Whistles
John McHaffie (> john@mcwhistles.com> )
+1.4177535099
Fax: +1.11
1593 LaRose
Rogersville, MO 65742
US
Might be the registrar’s information, and not McHaffie himself.
He hasn’t posted since April…
Are you trying to get ahold of him about some whistles or something?
He’s posted on thesession.org that he plays every monday from 7pm at the Magic Bean coffehouse in Springfield Missouri. That may be a lead for tracking him down.
Yes, a whistle I ordered should be here by now, but I don’t get an answer via email and I’ve tried the phone number that’s posted above and I get a fast busy signal. I’m not sure what to do.
I hope he’s OK.
Best wishes,
Jerry
Did you send him some money in advance?
How long ago at the address? If the website http://mcwhistles.com is down, I seriously doubt any email account associated with it would be functional.
PMing from here might not work either if the email account he forwards to is defunct. 
Good luck.[/code]
The email account for his profile is john@mcwhistles.com. This should not work if the www.mcshistles.com is gone.
He does list a msnMessenger account… mcwhistles@hotmail.com and a Yahoo account.
Something’s sounding very familiar about this..
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?topic=1935&forum=1
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=9370&highlight=mchaffie
In case you care.
I called John tonight, I got his phone number from the domain name registry. He had problems with the website, everything got erased, it’s currently down and we think the email is down as well.
I explained the email situation to him and he is going to drop in here at C&F and give a temporary email address to contact him at until the webiste problems can be cleared up.
Yes, it does. I don’t believe in those excuses. I think that if you want to reach out to your customers after your website went down, you’ll find a way to do it. It’s not as if Chiff was hard to access :roll:
… … … … …!!!
Chris
John doesn’t take money in advance for orders and to the best of my knowledge he hasn’t done for two years now. I think this kind of innuendo is grossly unfair, unjust, and completely unwarranted (if not malicious).
The domain “mcwhistles.com” doesn’t expire until January 2013, so where you get your pretty certainty from is beyond me.
ISPs upgrade hardware and OS all the time, I lost my own domain for the best part of a week (and that of course included the mailserver) because of just such an upgrade. And earlier this month they upgraded my mailserver from a Unix platform to a cruddy M$ platform, which meant four days of being unable to send or receive emails.
But go ahead and crucify the bloke by all means :roll:
For what it’s worth, Gary, I’m not crucifying him. And I’m not making any innuendos either. There IS something familiar about this.
When people didn’t speak up right away the last time McHaffie started having problems, they went on for what..something like a year? And a lot of people ended up burned. When he finally came back, I know he promised to try to remedy things. I don’t know if everyone got their money back or whistles or whatnot…I didn’t keep up with it. I had gotten my whistle early on. But if more people than Gemini are having problems, perhaps this thread will serve a useful purpose.
The last time, when he first started having problems, they seemed plausible, and he seemed quick to try to get back into the swing of things too. He started off having problems with his epilepsy, and then computer problems, and then his grandmother in the hospital, and finally having an apprentice secretly taking orders and making them, keeping the money, and running off or something like that (if I recall). Somewhere in there was a continual problem of his ISP taking his site and email down without notice as well. And, of course, was the problem of the postal service losing a lot of mail to and from his location, which I recall hearing him say wasn’t that rare.
I’m not saying this time is the same situation at all, because yes, ISPs have problems. But I don’t think I’d feel right just ignoring history, either. I guess since you joined in 2003, you wouldn’t have seen all of the horror stories. There’s more to it than just those two threads already posted.
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=295
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=289
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=397
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=428
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=652
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=885
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=1393
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?p=5137
etc etc