Since I just turned down an offer to review a whistle, I suppose I should let the cat out of the bag…I’ve been tinkering with making whistles recently
Latest effort out of Zebrawood
Still having to work out how to make the mouthpiece brass lines clean…I think I’m going to try experimenting with doing it on the lathe, and if that doesn’t work, hit up a local cnc machine shop to see what they can do about helping me out.
I’m also unsure about putting ferrules on the end of the whistle. I think this is a potential crack-causing problem, and I’m not sure if it’s better to ferrule it for strength against dings and risk some cracks, or not ferrule it and risk cracks from knocking the whistle about.
Haven’t tried my hand at a tuning slide yet.
Only a whistlemaker would believe how much wood I’ve destroyed in my garage
Nice work, Greg – how does it play? Needless to say, I can believe how much wood you’ve destroyed. I haven’t had a blank of zebrawood survive yet. It’s amazing what havoc a couple thousand rpm and a sharp, or, better yet, just slightly dull tool can wreak. Don’t forget those safety glasses.
I’m actually having pretty good luck with the zebrawood. I managed to get a bunch of it relatively inexpensively, so it’s my primary practice wood now that my birdseye maple is mostly gone. I’ve broken one piece of redwood and am nervously waiting on some other equipment to arrive that I hope will reduce the fail rate before working on the other piece. It looks so nice, I really want it to make it to a finished whistle.
The whistle itself is a little chiffy, and takes a bit more push in the 2nd octave than I like…but isn’t really terrible. You can hear me hit the 2nd octave flat a couple times because of it in the clip.
The zebrawood I’ve played with in the past had a distinctive disagreeable smell, do you find that as well? Personally, I’d forget about the foot ring, there are more problems created by using them than they solve.
That’s been my opinion as well…but you know, I haven’t made a 100 whistles or anything, so it’s not even really an informed opinion. More like an educated guess
As to the smell of zebrawood, it smells midly of mulch when I’m working it and kicking up dust, but it isn’t really noticeable afterwards. Nobody who’s seen it in person has made any mention of it, either. All of the wood I got came from one big piece of wood, so I don’t know if other trees would produce more- or less-strongly smelled wood.
I’ve traded out most of my whistles. I have one of yours, a Tony Dixon, a couple Westons, a Whistlesmith, a Susato and a host of cheapies. Most of my high end whistles were traded out a while back, and the ones I paid for (which includes all the wooden ones but the Weston) got sold recently..
Lol..I’ve promised myself I wouldn’t buy another top-dollar whistle until I could pay for it with whistle money…so it’s probably going to be quite a few months yet before I can get that burke composite I’m jonesing for.
I did the whistle body on a lathe…two actually. A big cheap one for drilling and roughing, and a smaller, more expensive one for the final cuts.
The mouthpiece brass I made with pre-made copper tubing from the local hobby shop. I have tried cutting the tubing into pieces with a little saw and with a dremel, but it didn’t come out as clean as I’d like. In the zebrawood whistle shown, I actually dremeled the brass at a slight angle by accident. the whistle plays, but the mouthpiece looks sloppier than I can live with.
My next set of experiments will be to mount the tubing on a wooden dowel, put it on the lathe, spin it up, and use a parting tool to cut the tubing into pieces of the required size. It should be a lot better quality than the dremel method. The cuts should be clean, and parallel to each other.
The equipment I was waiting for arrived yesterday, and I managed to knock out 4 whistle bodies after my son went to bed, breaking only one blank..so I went from a 60% fail rate to an 80% success rate on tubing out wood…that’s promising
I’m a bit suspicious of the very deep intrusion of the fipple-plug into the tone body, alternately the shortness of the brass windway roof. This will favour the external stream a bit strongly. Perhaps the brass bit should be a tad longer - I note the chamfer on the fipple-plug - this intrigues me - some great whistles have that, some do not. It’s a funny thing - I see some of the old-old designs chamfer both top and bottom, it’s also funy that we spend a lot of complexity concentrating the air stream only to un-concentrate it with a chamfer.
Still, the clip sounds good! You have seen more whistles than me The whole whistle-makery thing still seems like magic to me - well done! Keep em coming!
Are you meaning to do this with a hand held parting tool? If so, I wouldn’t recommed this approach, for safety reasons: As soon as you get through the metal to the wood, you’re tool is likely to dig in severly, and catch, possibly causing injury. If you don’t have a metal lathe for cutting the tubing to size, why not just use a tubing cutter from the hardware store? They are cheap, easy to use, and safe.
Well, it’s interesting isn’t it: Those so called old-old designs, with chamfers top and bottom, would be recorders, which happen to have what is typically considered a very pure sound. Hmm, does all that chamfering really “un-concentrate” the air stream then? Guess it depends on how you look at it…
The pic is a bit of an opitcal illusion. I think shadows and stuff make it look more intruded than it actually is. It reminds me of the Sweetheart Pro and the Chieftain in that the plug intrudes in a bit. I don’t have any set formulas at this point. I cut the windway, file, put everything together where it sounds the best. If it doesn’t sound great, I file some more here and there. Eventually, I put it all in place, and wherever it sounds good, that’s where I glue it. So far, most of my efforts have ended up with the little intrusion. I’m sure, eventually, I’ll come up with some method that works consistently for me.
I have two tubing cutters…they work via a compression cut, and thus, deform the tube slightly. The parting tool I’ll be using will be on the metal lathe, not hand-held, and i’ll be moving in increments of thousandths of an inch. I’m pretty sure it’ll work out just fine.
if you could reduce the chiff a bit that would sound really really good as opposed to just really good 
Sorry for the ignorance but what tools did you use to make it without a lathe?