The windway should be narrowing towards the window instead of the other way around. You want to increase the airspeed as it moves through it… Usually it works well enough just making the windway without any changes in dimensions from the beak to the window.
You will need to push down the blade somehow to get it in the airstream from the windway though this can be hard to do on a whistle made of polymer pipes.
Cheers,
Anders
You may want to check out some of the castable products at www.alumilite.com I don’t know what their availability would be outside the US.
The most obvious difficulty with your draft, West, apart from the direction of taper as already noted, is that you are using a flat-floored windway aiming at a curved labium blade. That is why Guido and others adopt the round floored windway/unflattened plug with clip-on cap. In molded whistle heads or plastic recorders and in turned wooden whistles and recorders, the maker can design the labium/cut the relevant part of the bore as they wish to coincide with the floor of the windway, so flat ones are feasible - you need to examine some to see what I mean. When you look through a windway with your line of sight along the floor, the edge of the labium blade needs to be just a hair’s breadth above that line, in parallel with it both vertically and laterally. Otherwise, whilst you may generate a tone, at best there will be significant air wastage and undue turbulence making the tone generation less efficient and giving a lot of extraneous and undesirable hiss, and quite likely greater difficulty in control between 8ves etc. or it may not be willing to sound properly at all. The full bore round plug, tube side cut-out and windway-cap are the simplest way of achieving the proper windway-window-labium conformation in pre-extruded cylindrical tube, actually taking advantage of its form. If you use a flattened fipple as you suggest, you will need also to put some kind of counter-ramp of filler under the down-tube side of your rough-cut window in order to be able to cut/file a straight-edged labium to match - and such a lump in the tube may have tuning and response implications… altogether more complex. It might be possible to heat up and mold the tube wall flat in the labium-to-be area, but that would be tricky to do consistently. (That is in effect what Tony Dixon appears to do on the whistles he makes from conduit tube, but I guess he has developed machine tools for the task!)
To answer your earlier Q about the curved beak, this is what I do:
Cut off the excess part of the original windway-fipple construction at the desired angle with a hacksaw, being careful not to go too close to but to be parallel to a line joining the lower corners of the windway floor at the top, nor too close to the down-tube face of the plug at the bottom. I tend (so far, all twice!) to go for two cuts, in from each side/end separately, which allows you to cut a shallow V if you wish. However, I’m using hand tools - if one has a machine mitre saw then a single cut would be easier - and easy to set up for accuracy. However you cut, you will need to tidy up with a file and abrasives. I use half-round metal files to produce the curve - which of course you can do whether you have a flat or V cut after sawing. I start with a fairly coarse one to get the basic shape, than tidy up with progressively finer ones and finally wet-and-dry paper.
There you go!
I am tending towards making longer windways/plugs in order to be able to cut a more comfortable, more acute beak angle - I don’t like less than 45 degrees and that is too little really (unless you like to hold your whistle out at a flattish angle when playing - I don’t!); a curve helps get more comfort in a shorter beak, but really more length to allow nearer a 30 degree angle (relative to long axis) is desirable, curved or not.
As for sourcing the black pipe, where did you get your white stuff? Plumbing supplies or DIY store? Try an electrical factor for electrical conduit and ask to see their catalogue. Here in Britain one can find both colours in the DIY chainstores, but less of the black, and less variety of sizes. Go to the pros! When I stocked up for my piccolo making course, I had to special order the 16mm OD tube (30x3m lengths! - will keep me going for a while - but cost me less than £40GBP) as even the electrical factors don’t usually stock it - not much demand for so small a size - they usually carry the 20mm OD and 25mm OD in both black and white. Have a look at this: http://www.aurigaeurope.com/partners/mk/Egatube.pdf. I’d be surprised if there isn’t an equivalent in most European countries.
West,
Good to see you thinking and sharing. perhaps you’ll find a way to get what you are looking for. As Jem has said, your wind way shape and position relative to the labium edge are critical. Try to deliver a smooth flowing sheet of air to that edge, which needs to be at the very bottom of the flow. and with the typical air speeds, the wind way height needs to be somewhere around 1.5 mm.
The curved wind way is credited with helping condensation escape out the corners without bothering the air flow as much as it can on a flat wind way.
So if the wind way bottom needs to align with the labium edge, and you need 1.5 mm for the wind way, the body material will need to be thick enough to contain both the wind way and the roof above the fipple without sticking up. Then you can either cut the wind way into the roof or turn down the OD of the body at the mouthpiece section to your wind way height and then slip a mouthpiece over it that is the same OD as your whistle body. This seems to be how Glenn’s Water Weasel’s are made. But with thin wall material you have to have 1.5 mm for the wind way and then something on top to contain it. You can see how a thin brass mouthpiece would allow this to be done more easily than using PVC.
My advice is to take the simple path to making a playable instrument (a la Guido’s designs) and once you know what dimensions you must respect, then figure out how to achieve the appearance you like.
Have fun! I’m sure you will.
Carey
Ah! Flat windway floor + curved blade = bad idea. Okay, I’m glad I asked otherwise I may have spent a lot of time on a design that was doomed from the outset. I was just curious if it would work. I think I see the concept behind Guido’s whistles much clearer now. Thanks for clearing that up.
But still, how come Clarke originals sound as good as they do, considering they have a flat windway (with an arched roof) and a blade that is neither straight nor curved but… well, dented is the best description I can think of. It doesn’t look like a particularly exact design, yet it works quite well.
Opinions!!! I detest the darn things precisely because they are so breathy/dirty sounding and relatively unresponsive due to wastage of wind (and therefore air-hungry). They can be tweaked by improving the shaping of the labium to get it flatter bar a small curve at the sides and by fiddling with the windway roof (I have a Shaw alto G made the same way that is just about playable for special use thus modified), but they’re never what I like in a whistle, heresy though that be to many! “Quite well”??? 
I’d say “just about”!
Personally I don’t mind the breathiness in the clarkes and I think mine sounds good (but then, it is slightly tweaked). They do waste a lot of air though, there’s no contending that.
Opinions aside, my point was merely: Clarkes do work, so an oddly shaped blade is obviously not a whistle-killer.
West, you’re making good progress. Lots of interesting ideas being put forth as well. When I saw your design I had the same reactions Jem and Carey had based on my experience. So I am with them on ways to improve your design. I can offer some suggestions on the simple two-piece head construction. Both have been mentioned above but here are the ways I have approached them.
Recorders are frequently two-piece designs - tube and plug. The windway is cut into the inside of the tube at the head. This is called broaching. Mack Hoover makes CPVC heads using this design. I rough cut the voicing window to undrsized dimensions. Then I place a small stick in the window as a stop which protects the tubing where the labium will be formed. I then file out the windway to roughly half the thickness of the tube. This can be tedious on a narrow bore tube. Then I file the labium, fit the plug and adjust as needed.
For a “Dixon” style I tried this with CPVC. I made a mandrel shaped to the dimensions to which I wanted head to conform. This is pretty simple really. Take a dowel sized to the inside diameter of your pipe, make a small flat on the top for about 1" placed where you expect the mandrel to exit the tube. File another flat beyond that which is lower than the first by the thickness of your pipe. Actually the difference in height should be your desired windway height. Set the mandrel aside. Make a rough, undersized cut of the window into your pipe. Then immerse the head end of the pipe into acetone to soften the CPVC. Once the CPVC is pliable, insert the mandrel into the head. Line up the window and press the CPVC into place over the mandrel. You are trying to get a nice windway height out of this so make sure the tube is sufficiently flattened at the window. Let it set-up to retain its shape. File your blade. Make your plug with a flat top to line up a hair under the edge of the blade. Adjust as needed. I don’t like this process much but it does work with care. I’ve tried a heat gun too and enjoyed that even less. If you can find the same tubing Dixon and Jem use you can avoid the acetone bath. That tubing is softened by dipping it into sufficiently warmed water. It can distort or even shrink if the water gets too hot though. I’ve tweaked a couple of Dixons that way. Let us know how you are progressing
Feadoggie
It has been mentioned above to make a flat wind to a flat blade, and a curved wind way to a curved blade.
The whistle I made in my avatar has no clip on cap, and has a curved windway to a curved blade. Click on the link below for some other examples of both clip on cap, and an internal sleeve. This leaves no visible cut on the out side of the whistle. With a clip on cap the wind way is cut into the tube than covered with the external cap. The internal sleeve has the windway cut into it and fits around the plug then slides into the whistle.
One advantage to the internal sleeve is you see no cut on the outside.
The other way to make a whistle with no cut on the outside is to machine the windway into the plug. I find it best to use a lathe to make the external cap or the internal sleeve. But before I had a lathe I used a drill press to drill out the tube, and drill another tube to make the sleeve from. However, I have a slow speed wet grinder to grind flat wood drills to a new size, and it requires a good holding setup to drill into the end of a tube.
Okay, some updates! First of all: no, it didn’t take me this long. I’ve been down with a cold for almost a week and only this afternoon did I feel up to giving the whistle making a go again.
Body, fipple plug and fipple cap ready to be assembled. As you can see I ended up using the wood plug after all, I haven’t had time to go hunting for other materials.
Before drilling the holes…
…and after.
Done, basically.
It ain’t pretty but for a first try, it’ll have to do.
Looks the biz - how does it toot?
It toots great! Actually, it sounds and plays better than the Dixon polymer D I bought just a few days ago…
The tone is sweet and mellow and ever so slightly breathy. The holes might still need some adjusting but it’s hard to say. It’s surprisingly sensitive to breath pressure – more than any other whistle I have – so I don’t know if I should try fixing the intonation or simply get used to the way it handles.
This is where a lathe comes in real handy. I can turn down a foot of fipple stock in a minute.
Other ways:
Once you spend a couple hours on the fipple…getting it oh so right, it’s that last tone hole that becomes ‘possessed by satan’. 
Good luck but be careful…it’s habit forming!
This is where a lathe comes in real handy. I can turn down a foot of fipple stock in a minute.
Other ways:
Once you spend a couple hours on the fipple…getting it oh so right, it’s that last tone hole that becomes ‘possessed by satan’.
Good luck but be careful…it’s habit forming!
Looks like a good effort! What’s next?
Yes, well, I think I’ll have to get quite a bit more serious about whistle making before I decide to get a lathe. 
I tried the x-acto knife approach, to little avail. As mentioned that wood is really, really hard – I’m kind of curious what it is. It sort of chips and comes off in little pieces. It wasn’t possible to shave off thin slices of it, at least not with any precision.
Haha 
I’m not sure there is a next, but if so, this is the plan:
1. Grow some patience. Seriously, I’m not sure I have the patience for this stuff. When I got to the point of drilling the holes, I just wanted to get it over with. So the outcome is probably not as good as it could be.
2. Get some different materials to work with. Not only was the wood difficult to work with, I’m also suspecting that the PVC pipe is a fair bit harder than the one used in Guido’s tutorial. For example, there was no way I could have used a pair of scissors to make the holes. Or, possibly, the whole procedure was harder than I thought it would be.
3. Get some additional tools. First and foremost, a small table vice. Keeping the whistle body in place while sawing and drilling was tricky to say the least. I could also use a larger assortment of files – especially round ones in a few different sizes.
4. Make a whistle in a key I don’t have yet. This would make me feel more motivated, I think. D was a good place to start as I don’t have a D whistle I really, really like yet. But if I’m going to make more of 'em, I will probably be aiming for a B or an A.
Anyhoo, thanks for the encouraging words everyone!
And aint that just right…
West: There’s a fifth point that should be on your list. -Get to know someone with a lathe. It makes whistlemaking a LOT easier though it will put you further down that slippery slope you are walking on…
Cheers,
Anders
And aint that just right…
West: There’s a fifth point that should be on your list. -Get to know someone with a lathe. It makes whistlemaking a LOT easier though it will put you further down that slippery slope you are walking on…
Cheers,
Anders
Ah, right. I’ll put that on my mental list of conversation topics for when I meet new people.
“So, do you have a lathe?”
Whatever “turns” you on 
Stay Hoopy
Mike