The last time I visited this Forum, and the last time I posted was in 2017, right before I bought a 3D printer. I was trying to make Guido Gonzato style “Low Tech Whistles” out of PVC pipe. The main problem I ran into was the lack of wood dowels of the right size to fit the PVC conduit pipe I had available, and I thought I’d print the whistle blocks using a 3D printer. I did this, and got sidetracked by trying to design a fipple assembly for PVC pipe, and eventually lost interest in it because I tried to design it as one part and ran into problems.
Fast forward to about a month ago - I came across one of Nicholas Bras’s YouTube videos, in which he 3D printed a transverse flute. He put the design online. I downloaded it and printed it, and also found he’d uploaded a flute head that would fit on 20mm PVC conduit. Someone in the comments suggested that SOMEONE design a pennywhistle head for PVC pipe and the interest was rekindled. Now having had several years of 3D printing and design under my belt I realized, this time, that if I made it a two part head that glued together, a lot of the problems inherent in 3D printing something like this could be avoided, and so 3 weeks later I uploaded my design to Thingiverse:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6844068
As it states - this is a work in progress. It’s designed around 20mm PVC electrical conduit (and therefore suitable for “alto” whistles - see Guido’s guide), but I think you should be able to scale the .STL files up and down to suit the PVC tubing you have (the 13mm tubing you need for a high D whistle is impossible to find around here). The Bb whistles I’ve made so far have problems, but this is something to work on. I’ve included the CAD file (I use 123D Design, which is no longer supported by Autodesk but can be downloaded from various places) in case you want to tweak the 3D model itself, or you can play with the various .STL files I’ve included. There are options for varying the size of the window, and the width and thickness of the windway. You can also modify the parts with a file and/or a knife.
If you have a 3D printer, or have a friend who owns one, give this a try, I’d love to see what others make of this. And if you have some 3D printed whistle designs of your own, you can post about them under here - I’d like to give them a try as well.
Iskandar