Not that I’ll start making whistles anytime soon, but this is for all you people who turn whistles, especially wooden ones.
How do you hold the whistle in the lathe? Do you work on an oversized piece of wood till the very end? Have a special sort of soft collet that you hold it with? I’ve wracked my brain and can’t figure out how one could fixture a very thin wooden tube with a standard lathe chuck without marring the surface or making the tube collapse.
Thanks!
I’ve done it between centers. Or with a mandral that looks like this:
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where the brackets are nuts, the line is a threaded rod and the slants are angled centers that pinch the piece.
Erik
Well, I see that that didn’t work. The slanted lines are supposed to be right inside of the brackets, one for the left and one for the right.
Erik, thanks for the reply. To make sure I understand you, you use the threaded rod as a mandrel and pinch the whistle tubing on it? Does the threaded rod run true enough?
Thanks, Charlie
I have a metal turning lathe, three jaw chuck and the headstock is hollow. The whistle fits inside the headstock.
I start with a 1x1x12 turning square held in the chuck on one end, dead center on the tailstock. Turn an inch or so round near the tailstock, then reverse the piece and turn the whole thing round ( my wife calls this “making sticks”). These get cut into appropriate lengths ( roughly) for the head and body tubes.
Next, the bore gets drilled using a variety of drilling, boring and gundrilling ( this is a fairly complex phase of things). One end of the tube is in the chuck, the other is supported by a steadyrest. At this point, the walls are very thick, and collapsing is not an issue.
Now the pieces “rest” to shrink or expand, and stabilize as the wood loses or gains moisture depending on humidity, etc. This is a minimum of a month-- I take micrometer measurements every week or so and don’t reume work until the wood stops moving.
From here the wood is turned on a mandrel or arbor which is mounted between centers in the head and tailstock. Once the tube has reached it’s final OD, it is very thin, but it still needs to be chucked for some operations such as boring the inset for the tuning slide. I put a plug into the bore to prevent cracking, and wrap the outside with paper to prevent marring the already applied finish.
The making of a good, thin walled wooden tube is the vast majority of the work involved in making a wooden whistle, and is where most of the disasters can occur! After that, I breathe a lot easier…
Yes and yes. It’s really the same things as turning between centers, but you’re just moving the centers in a bit. I think this fits into Pauls model at “here the wood is turned on a mandrel or arbor which is mounted between centers in the head and tailstock”. Same general idea.