On their way to the Good Doctor, are:
1 High D copper, engraved
1 High C chromoly, plain
Look for the big red, white, and blue Tyvek envelope.
It occurred to me that, in my hurry to get the things to Paul, I may have not swabbed out the barrels to remove excess polish. It prolly won’t affect the playability, but if you think it does, just use the cleaning patch setup from your IMI Desert Eagle.44 Magnum, with a few drops of rubbing alcohol on it. It works great!
Another thing I’m thinking about now, is how to taper the copper whistles I’m making, as theory has it that the octaves will be more uniform in a tapered tube. I thought about turning a tapered roller, and building a gear-driven rolling mill to size the tubing internally from 1/2" to 5/8" or 3/4" at the fipple end. Thoughts, anyone?
Methodology that would also work, would be to use .032 wall 3/4" copper, shear out a long “V”, compress onto a tapered mandrel and solder. That would be simple, but would leave a thin silver line down one side. Hmmmm… not aesthetically bad, maybe!
I’ve always preferred a cylindrical bore rather than tapered. On my meg it seems harder to half hole some of the lower notes (yes, I do play one tune that requires an Eb on a D whistle!) - I think the taper requires that the d hole is smaller, but I’m not certain of this.
If you leave back-space behind the window, this affects the upper octave more than the lower, and can be used to bring the octaves into true.
On the other hand, some people consider that equal temperament is a thing for classical instruments and that the sound of the whistle should be appreciated for itself…
Anyway, my thought on the matter would be that if you want a conical bore, you should do it the same as the irish flute, and use a tapered reamer to hollow the core to the desired dimensions. This may involve getting copper or brass (or chromoly steel, but that’s going to kill your drillbits and reamer, I think?) rod and boring out, or maybe you can find really thick walled tubing.
Before messing with conical, you might look at some books on old-style flute construction and/or Benade’s books. Or you could just experiment and ignore everybody else, it worked for Boehm… of course, those of us in ITM aren’t very happy with what he did to the flute, but it seems to work for orchestral music, which was the point.
–Chris
PS: And look at ‘The Amateur Wind-Instrument Maker’ … no whistle instructions, per se, but there’s flutes and clarinets and recorders and such (and racketts!) and a lot good sense and enough principle to get a bit of a handle on which changes are going to do what.
[ This Message was edited by: ChrisA on 2002-08-27 14:44 ]
It sounds like a lot of work to build a tapering roller, have you looked at David Daye’s pages and read his thoughts on making a stepped bore using telescopic tubing? It seems a stepped bore responds in the same way as a tapered bore.
On 2002-08-27 15:58, bodhrans wrote:
It sounds like a lot of work to build a tapering roller, have you looked at David Daye’s pages and read his thoughts on making a stepped bore using telescopic tubing? It seems a stepped bore responds in the same way as a tapered bore.
Interesting idea! I can get telescoping tube in the chromoly, but not in the copper, AFAIK (I use the dreaded Type L that everyone disses 'cause it’s heavy, but I like the way it sounds!). A tapered roller isn’t really all that difficult to build, if you can locate appropriate gearing. In fact, however, I think I’m going to use the method of cutting a “V” out of the tube. I think the silver solder line can be a decorative element. Besides, this will just be an experiment, unless it really pans out. Then, I’d build the roller!