its a wet horrible evening here in the UK, and I am just playing a few tunes on me whistles,
I am lucky enough to have an O’riordan black tubed delrin head? now on close inspection after playing it for a while you do get some condensation coming out of the fipple plug, its always done this, but I have always been intrigued because O’riordans are always described as having delrin heads, if i compare this to My sindt whistle, Pats delrin if it is delrin is way softer, so are they maybe a a type of pvc??
I have an O’Riordan low D, and the mouthpiece is made of black ABS plastic.
There is a good degree of hand carving necessary with Pat’s design, and Delrin is just too tough to be a good choice of materials for a design that isn’t mostly machined.
that clears that up, I always wondered how he would hand carve the ramp as you can see the tool marks on it, and like you said delrin is pretty tough, I have turned it in rod form when I had my metal lathe, very cheap stuff, especially if you buy off cuts and short lenghts.
I recall asking Mr. O’Riordan what the “F” in the serial number on his whistles stood for, and he said that it was because it was an FDA approved material that he used. I don’t remember if he said it was acetyl or delrin, though that detail may be in an email somewhere.
I have noticed over the years that the heads on Pat’s whistles (the anodized aluminum Travelers) do show some signs of wear, actually sort of “scuff” marks, whereas the delrin heads (actually portions of heads) in my Sindts, Copelands, Burkes have never shown any wear and are a harder, denser, shinier material. As you may have noticed, the scuff marks do not seem to inhibit the heavenly tones emanating from Pat’s whistles, though.
