I used the blue poster tack tweak on a couple of fipples, and last night was looking at the surface of the blue tack, and wondered how I could make it smoother. I happened to have a pencil with a somewhat used eraser end laying right at my fingers and thought it might work better than a hard ended device (careful there Dale, I know what you are thinking…) like a pen’s end, and it worked GREAT. In under 15 seconds I was able to make the face of the blue tack smooth and seamless.
If only my whistle playing could be improved so quickly…
I use the flat end of my exacto knife’s handle. Once in awhile, it will seem that the poster putty doesn’t want to go completely smooth, so I’ll moisten the end of the handle slightly so it doesn’t stick at all to the poster putty. Then it smooths out nicely.
Because it was slightly used the face of the eraser was more rounded at the edges, which prevented it from “digging in” to the blue tack, creating more edges in the tack. That was the first problem I had with my previous “tack smashing” devices.
The eraser itself is a little softer and was thus not moving as much blue tack around, so I could use a bit of a rolling action to mold the tack a little bit of at a time with more strokes.
I suppose for those who’d like a contoured blue tack this would work well too.
For the obsessive, I will note that this was a number 2 pencil, hexagonal, yellow and made in the USA :roll:
I’ll let the aeronautical engineers give the definitive answer, but I think the idea is the smoother the better, because roughness would lead to more turbulence, which perhaps would make the jump from one octave to the next more variable.
I think that it helped my feadog a little, but it’s hard to say for sure.
I don’t do much tweaking nowadays because Jerry does it so much better. However, I always used a pencil eraser to smooth out the blue tack. Since an eraser is soft, I figured it would do less damage if my clumsy hand slipped and poked at the wrong place.
Back when I first tried the poster tac tweak and posted it here for all on the forum to try, I think I used the flat end of a pair of tweezers or perhaps even a small flat bladed screwdriver to make the ‘wall’ under the windway as flat as I could reasonably manage.
With this tweak, I don’t believe it’s so much how smooth the putty stuff is, but rather that it fills the empty cavity under the windway. Even Cillian O’Briain’s whistle have a bit of a dimple in the epoxy he uses. I don’t think it should be a big deal how smooth the final surface is - so long as you don’t have big globs of the stuff sticking into the windway or worse - out the voicing window itself!