My Burke narrow bore composite D is giving me trouble: it’s tunable, but recently it started resisting any tuning. It doesn’t want to budge.
I have been pretty good about lubricating – not every month, as the instructions say, but, pretty often. I’ve used petroleum jelly, which is one of the lubricants mentioned on the instruction sheet that came with the whistle. I’ve had this whistle since April, I think. This is the first time I’ve had trouble with it.
Today, once I got the whistle apart (which took some effort) I lubricated it again, and put it back together, but it really does not want to go back together. It is giving me major resistance. Currently I can’t get it tune properly as the lower half won’t go in far enough.
Anyone have any advice or relevant experience, before I mail Michael Burke?
Are other lubricants better than petroleum jelly?
Is it possible that the whistle is affected by the change of the seasons? (But… it’s Bakelite, I thought it was stable)
You can try Byll’s suggestion of cork grease but if you still have a problem, my first course of action would be to contact Mike and see what he says since it’s still under warranty. Overall, Mike’s whistles are amazingly consistent, but as with any manufactured product, there can be slight variations in tolerances along the way, depending how often machinery tolerances are checked and maintained. Not saying this is the case, and certainly no offense to Mike, but it’s possible tolerances in the particular batch in which your whistle was included were a hair off, and you’ll always have issues with it. Whatever the cause, you’re experiencing a problem that shouldn’t be there and I’d suggest contacting Mike.
Two of our session players use Burke Composite Narrow Bores and have no problems. However, I had the very same issue with my composite C that you’re experiencing, so it does happen.
Hey - did you check & see if the internal o-rings are in place? I’ve got a Burke brass whistle & I has a couple of plastic or rubber o-rings inside the tuning slide. If one of those are not seated properly the tube won’t slide in. I’d check it carefully and whatever you do don’t force harder than you have in the past to get the tube in. Mine requires a fair amount of pressure to push it into place, but these whistles are made to very tight tolerances so that’s probably why.
I didn’t get around to contacting Mr. Burke over the fact that my DCN had frozen up.
But I did leave it in my car, thinking that perhaps the change of temperature might cause the parts to loosen up. After a day in the cold: no difference, the whistle still wasn’t tunable. After a week in the cold, I tried again, and this time it was perfectly, easily tunable – so easy to tune that I could hardly imagine that this was the same whistle that had been locked up tight.
So the whistle has come in from the cold, and it still seems perfectly easy to tune.
But, one problem remained: it’s flat, so I go to slide the body into the head a little more, and… it doesn’t stay, it immediately slides back out, so it’s still a little flat.
The next day I tried again, and this time, I can get the thing into tune; it doesn’t slide back out.
So I’m guessing there’s something amiss around the vicinity of the o-ring? grease accumulation maybe? I should try to get a look in there with a flashlight…
But anyway, the sudden, total freeze-up of my Burke DCN disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared. Weird.
I am not a big fan of using petroleum jelly for anything needing a long term lubrication. It can harden over time and cause a stuck joint. Cork grease or even chapstick are preferable. I know a trumpet player who used vaseline on his trumpet slides with disasterous results.