hey guys im new to chiff&fipple ,Does anyone know where i can get an old generation Bb whistle or does anyone have any for sale,just that my old GEN Bb barrel broke thanks to a family member ,ive tried putting the old GEN head on a few new barrels and cant get the same tone as i had with the old GEN barrel,Thanks
eBay has one on auction at the moment. The seller (another Guru from California!) has some interesting items up for bid. I won’t say which ones I am bidding on - not the Bb Gen.
Good luck.
Feadoggie
Many thanks ,and thanks for the link,i better get bidding
Old and new Generation tubes are identical. The difference, most likely, is that yours had been played a lot and the inside of the tube had accumulated some residue, which tends to make the whistle sound mellower.
Best wishes,
Jerry
I’ll not tell, one way or the other. 
That is an interesting assortment of instruments. Isn’t it?
Feadoggie
Ohhh! Ronald Reagan Jelly Beans…
Is that what you’re after?
Best wishes.
Steve
Nope, I thought the jelly beans might be a bit stale at this point. Actually, some of those beans look down right nasty.
Is that what was meant when people described him as a “bean movie actor”?
I think he was referred to as a has-bean movie actor.
Best wishes.
Steve
You ready to share what one(s) you were bidding on? And did you win?
Best wishes.
Steve
I did not win anything. 
I thought the vintage medical gadgets were a hoot but I had no interest in bidding on those. The musical instruments got bid up more than I wanted to go. There was a Sweetheart fife that looked interesting. As did a couple reed pipes. Zurnas, I think? No matter. I won a Peeler fife in C at a good price from another auction. I like Ron’s instruments.
The Bb Gen went for $30. Egad! I never thought I would see the day - or the week - when Gens went at such a price - not to mention Jerry’s vintage tweaked models going for more than $100. I guess the economy is not as bad overall as it seems to be in my corner of the world.
Feadoggie
It’s the false hype that tries to sell the idea that vintage Generation = superior.
Someone sent me private messages last week, speaking of snake-oil sellers and referencing PT Barnum. Can’t say I disagreed. As I said before: there are a lot of people with more money than sense.
Does that mean you’re willing to send me your favorite older Gen in your collection if I send you a brand new one? Let me know where to send the money.
Does that mean you’re willing to send me your favorite older Gen in your collection if I send you a brand new one? Let me know where to send the money.
Not really a well thought out post (where does the money come in if you want to trade whistles?)
And it’s not really a fair trade, is it? You want my ‘favourite’ for any old random one, or any random new one actually. But that is not how it works. It’s just as hard, or easy, to pick a nice new one as it was to pick a nice old one, when they were new.
To be honest, most of the old ones standing in the vase here aren’t particularly nice. They’re OK. They’re able to do the job. Mostly.
Making a whistle is a matter of compromises. The older Generations (let’s assume we’re talking about the Ds, the designs of Cs for example aren’t significantly different to suit the purposes of this discussion) favoured a sweet-ish and well balanced second octave but lacked a bit in volume in the lower end. The new design addressed that: the new Ds were stronger at the lower end but lost some of the balance and sweetness the old ones had. You win some, you loose some. And after that it’s a matter of preference. And ofcourse that bit of sentimentality attached to the whistles we once learned to play on and how used we got to how sweet they were and how the new ones lost that. In reality however both the old and the new design produced anything from not so great to very lovely, you just have to pick one that suits you as a player, then as much as now.
So if you’d send me a really nice new one, I would probably have a few Ds I’d be happy to let go. But that wouldn’t be very rational from your point of view, would it? Because, why would you send away a really nice whistle to trade for any random old one? I know I wouldn’t. Just as I wouldn’t send of my ‘favourite’ old whistle (just assuming I have one) in exchange for a random new one.
Just so. And the post was tongue in cheek, money reference was for the shipping, no offense intended, etc. For the record, I’d pay much for one of Mr. Gumby’s whistles – even just any old whistle – just to be able to say I had one.
Just to add in my thoughts:
I own quite a few older Generations, and there are good ones and there are bad ones.
The new ones are mostly awful, which gives them a bad reputation.
Now: with many older instruments, the better ones have been kept and played whereas the bad ones don’t and get thrown out over time. The possibility is that older Generations have more of a % of good to bad, from weeding out over the years.
Out of my old Generations there is one killer D and one killer Bb, the rest are pretty average/poor. I have a self-modified modern Bb which is close sounding to the old one.
As someone who collects these old Generations this post is probably going to drive the price up but I think I need to chime in on this. The reason I love collecting them is because they are/were often cheaper than contemporary whistles and can sometimes turn out to be great players with a lovely upper octave.
That’s some mighty wishful thinking… drive up the price… as collecting (anything) has the intrinsic oddity of value, where the value is merely what someone else is willing to pay. In the end everything depreciates/deteriorates including humans. 
Collecting Generations certainly isn’t a get rich activity. And a individual player’s skill level will determine the real value.
A neighbour of mine has a case full of them, forty years worth of them I believe.