And before Gasbandit asks...
Yes, I've eaten a hairy sausage
Yes, I've eaten a hairy sausage
Now that the bandwagon has moved on, AMA :)
- Thread starter Tinwhistler
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GasBandit
Staff member
And before Gasbandit asks...
Yes, I've eaten a hairy sausage
If I recall, at one point, you mentioned you've made whistles in the past? Tell me more about that.
What is it about cooking you most enjoy - the process, or the results, or something else? Why?
What do you do to motivate yourself when you have a task you need to do but don't want to do?
What is it about cooking you most enjoy - the process, or the results, or something else? Why?
What do you do to motivate yourself when you have a task you need to do but don't want to do?
Can you read music or do you learn your tunes by listening?
What other instruments do you play?
If one were to visit D.C., where would you suggest they stay, and how to get about?
What is your favorite cuisine?
Do all of your exes live in Texas?
What other instruments do you play?
If one were to visit D.C., where would you suggest they stay, and how to get about?
What is your favorite cuisine?
Do all of your exes live in Texas?
1) So, I like doing crafty things. Cooking falls under that. A couple years after I started playing whistles, I discovered the handmade whistle community. There's a whole different world out there beyond the $5.00 Generation brand whistles you find at many music stores. So I've always been fascinated by it. One day, I sold 3 or 4 handmade whistles (some of which can go for between $600-1000) to fund my adventure in making them.
Using the money, I bought a 12" mini lathe (for shaping the bore), a 60" wood lathe from harbor freight for roughing out the square blanks to mostly round, and for drilling the hole. I had a custom gun drill made for the boring, since they're self guiding. I got a drill press for the finger holes and some jewlers files for shaping the windway and ramp. And I bought a pair of digital calipers so I could measure all of the whistles in my collection to figure out the magic formula for bore sizes etc.
I would go to Woodcraft and buy 12x1x1 hardwood blanks by the dozen.
I practiced for nearly a year before I made my first salable whistle in terms of quality, which I still carry with me. I sold maybe 300 whistles at $75.00 a pop. I started experimenting with making whistles out of Corian (the stuff they make countertops out of), which was really stable and made great sounding whistles, but was brittle and wouldn't survive a drop.
http://www.tinwhistler.com/music/reviews/stonehenge/stone_rye.mp3
It wasn't long before two other guys took inspiration (the whistle world is small) and started making hardwood whistles, but for $35.00 a pop. My sales dried up. According to the business plan I drew up, those prices were unsustainable, because sometimes wood just breaks and so you have loss. And I was already making less than minimum wage working weekends in the garage, so I closed shop. Those guys did too within 18 months or so.
I sold the lathes for more than I paid for them to a guy who did robotics at NASA and who had broken his lathe. He needed them that day for an emergency project and couldn't get one. I sold the rest of the power equipment, and consider the entire venture a success--I ended up making more than it cost me to get started (lathes are expensive, yo) in less than a year.
A part of me wishes I hadn't sold the equipment, but I was in the process of preparing for my divorce, and since I wasn't using them, downsizing my assets seemed to be the sensible option.
I want to get started again some day, but I will need a bigger lathe if I do. A 12" lathe is just barely suitable for the task. If I can sustain the same level of sales that I did the first time around, it'd make me some really nice money once I'm retired from the 40+ hour a week grind. Once you get really good at it, the median price for a hand made whistle hovers at around $350, so it's a good income if you can do it.
2) I love the crafty "create things people love" aspect of cooking. There's not much more satisfying than cooking a great dish and watching people sigh in pleasure as they eat it.
3) I bitch and moan about it, but ultimately, I just get up and do it. It's stuff that needs done, and waiting isn't going to make it better, so I just bite the bullet.[DOUBLEPOST=1454952708,1454952195][/DOUBLEPOST]
1) I read music, but not well enough to sight read while playing. Written Irish music is just a barebones representation of a piece anyway. It gives you the basic notes, but doesn't convey any of the flavor, nuance, or swing of a tune. So I use sheet music to learn the barebones, and then I listen to good players to understand how the tune is supposed to really be played.Can you read music or do you learn your tunes by listening?
What other instruments do you play?
If one were to visit D.C., where would you suggest they stay, and how to get about?
What is your favorite cuisine?
Do all of your exes live in Texas?
2) Transverse Irish flute, low whistle (which some people consider distinct from the traditional tinwhistle because the size requires a different play style, much like a violin and viola are just differently-sized versions of the same instrument), I took 2 years of piano, but I don't remember much (but I can still play enough Axel F to drive my wife crazy every time we go into a Radio Shack), I'm in the process of learning to play the violin, and I play uilleann pipes at a beginner-intermediate level. Uilleann pipes, despite having a chanter that looks a lot like a tinwhistle, has completely different fingerings.
The spoiler has a couple of vids of me playing the Uilleann pipes after a couple of weeks of practice. Most people need to play a few months before they can get to that level (which isn't awesome, but is passable), but I think the 20 years of tinwhistling helped me pick it up faster--different fingerings notwithstanding. I've gotten a lot better at the bellows work since then, which is where my musicality really suffers in the videos.
3) Hmm...I'd say stay anywhere near a metro station. Metro is *the* way to get around DC. It's affordable, easy, and relatively safe. Though I hear that there are some lines that you don't want to be on at certain times, I've never had any problems with fights or muggings. The further into DC you get, the more expensive stuff becomes, so you might want to stay a little further out like Falls Church, or along the new Silver Line that metro has put in and is currently expanding.
4) Asian. Doesn't matter of it's Thai, Japanese, Chinese, whatever. I just gravitate toward it whenever I have a choice. At any given moment, I may have a craving for a specific Asian cuisine, but it varies, and I wouldn't put any one above any other. Even within those broad guidelines, I know there are subgenres (like Hunan, Schezuan, etc). I haven't found one I didn't love.
That said, I do have a fondness for strawberry crepes romanoff.
5) All of my exes are from Texas, but I'm old. People move. My son's mom now lives in Durham, NC (of Bull Durham fame).
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Last time I did an AMA when everyone else was doing one, and I didn't get much love. I figured if I started one when people weren't burnt out on the idea, I might get some real questions instead of "which would you rather fight..a horse sized duck, or 100 duck sized horses."
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Interesting! I hadn't considered it, but those whistles do have a low diameter to length ratio. I've never used a gun drill, and am surprised you had good results on the wood lathe. I assume you drilled the stock completely through, then used the internal bore as your center for the machining lathe? That would eliminate an imprecision introduced by the wood lathe, though perhaps the whistles don't need more precision than the wood lathe provides - I just assume they do since you chose to get a machining lathe as well.
Most small machine lathes can be extended with a bed extender, so you keep the machine's relative smallness, but can handle the longer pieces. A larger lathe would also increase the turning diameter, which wouldn't be bad, but would probably be more expensive than an extended small lathe.
Any interest in sharing the magic numbers/equations you gathered?
Have you considered impregnating wood with resin? You can get temperature cured resins, like "cactus juice", that are soaked into the wood using a vacuum chamber and then pressure pot. They're often used to stabilize wood that might otherwise fly apart during turning, either due to imperfections or simply the low density of the wood. They should, however, significantly stabilize the wood for a whistle. Not as much as corian, I expect, but might be a significant difference from your normal finishing process in terms of temperature and humidity variation.
If you are considering doing this again, might as well start sooner than later, so by the time you want to retire you're already reestablished, and you can spend plenty of time defining your own techniques and styles beyond what you've already accomplished, as well as building a reputation and customer base. The limited supply might actually benefit you in the long run anyway.
You might also come up with a $35 whistle. Develop a few jigs, maybe a cheap gang drill, that allow you to make a dozen simple ones an hour, use a vibrating tumbler for deburring and final polishing (ie, no hand work), get the kids involved, and you could probably crank them out and create customers for your higher end whistles. Make it clear they are good for practice and beginners, and demonstrate the differences between them and the "real deal" (low end ones are heavier with thicker walls, low end materials, less stable, dimensions aren't as perfect due to production process, etc) and you should be able to segment your market and make a big enough niche that it makes it all worthwhile.
Most small machine lathes can be extended with a bed extender, so you keep the machine's relative smallness, but can handle the longer pieces. A larger lathe would also increase the turning diameter, which wouldn't be bad, but would probably be more expensive than an extended small lathe.
Any interest in sharing the magic numbers/equations you gathered?
Have you considered impregnating wood with resin? You can get temperature cured resins, like "cactus juice", that are soaked into the wood using a vacuum chamber and then pressure pot. They're often used to stabilize wood that might otherwise fly apart during turning, either due to imperfections or simply the low density of the wood. They should, however, significantly stabilize the wood for a whistle. Not as much as corian, I expect, but might be a significant difference from your normal finishing process in terms of temperature and humidity variation.
If you are considering doing this again, might as well start sooner than later, so by the time you want to retire you're already reestablished, and you can spend plenty of time defining your own techniques and styles beyond what you've already accomplished, as well as building a reputation and customer base. The limited supply might actually benefit you in the long run anyway.
You might also come up with a $35 whistle. Develop a few jigs, maybe a cheap gang drill, that allow you to make a dozen simple ones an hour, use a vibrating tumbler for deburring and final polishing (ie, no hand work), get the kids involved, and you could probably crank them out and create customers for your higher end whistles. Make it clear they are good for practice and beginners, and demonstrate the differences between them and the "real deal" (low end ones are heavier with thicker walls, low end materials, less stable, dimensions aren't as perfect due to production process, etc) and you should be able to segment your market and make a big enough niche that it makes it all worthwhile.
Well, as i mentioned, the gun drill is self-centering, so there was very little wander. I read that you could also use a lamp auger, but a gun drill polishes the bore as it drills, saving me an additional step. The drill I had made was a custom job with geometry made to cut wood, and an additional MT2 taper added to it so that it would fit on the wood lathe. It cost more than the drill press just for the drill bit.
Your guess is correct about drilling the bore first. Actually, first, I roughed out the square blank, drilled it through, and then put it on the machine lathe, using the bore as my center, for final lathing. The internal and external diameters have to be precise...a few thousands of an inch can change the finger hole size and placement, which is one of the reasons why cheap whistles can be so hit or miss on tuning. But using the bore as my center, and lathing a 1" square blank down to a .55" external diameter meant that the small amount of wander I did get on the gun drill using the crappy wooden lathe disappeared once I got the tube down to size.
Larger lathes are more expensive...but I read bad reviews about stability for the extender of the mini-lathe I was using at the time, so I didn't consider using one. Things may have improved over the last decade or so.
Nope
While I used calipers for my research, I still had to come up with my own final numbers, since some of these guys used routers and such for finger holes, and I had to stick with bit sizes I could get at home depot, meaning tube placement had to change and all that work took weeks to nail down to my satisfaction.So my numbers, while similar to some whistles, are still unique and my own trade secret. Plus, a lot of these guys use different hole sizes for every hole, whereas I developed a placement/hole setup that only took 3 different drill bits, to simplify things a bit. So it's my "secret sauce".
None of that prevents someone from taking a ruler and calipers to my whistles and figuring it out for themselves, of course, but I'd prefer to keep the information that make my whistles unique to me close to the vest in case I ever do get back into the biz.
But if you want to get started making a whistle and seeing what you think, take a look at:
http://www.ggwhistles.com/howto/
This guy shows how to make one using low-tech tools: PVC pipe, a hacksaw, scissors, tape. I've played one of his whistles that he made using this technique, and they're surprisingly good.
A number of makers use Dymondwood, which is a brand of wood product similar to what you describe. It's a plywood made with resin and bonded with heat and pressure. It also comes in really pretty colors. The problem with any layered and bonded wood is tearout. Since the product is made of many tiny layers, the glue/resin can fail in spots wherever you're drilling, leaving a ragged and unprofessional edge.
One of the things I'm going to look into if I get back into it is Delrin. It's a stabilized plastic product that produces a quality whistle. I have an Abell brand whistle that I paid $500 for made out of Delrin. It was the equal to his blackwood whistle in every way. With the delrin, I don't have to worry about the weather, or the wood splitting, and it looks just like blackwood from afar anyway.
I still have a jig I made that I stick a whistle tube on, and mark all the spots for drilling. As long as the tube is the exact same geometry every time, I can mark out the drill points in a couple of seconds.
The problem with hand-made whistles is that buyers expect quality. You can sell a crappier whistle for $35.00, but it kind of ruins your reputation. Either you sell a good one, or you don't. I'd have to sell cheap/lesser quality instruments outside the whistling community, say at renaissance festivals. But breaking back "in" to the community would be hard once you got a reputation for selling cheap stuff.
Most makers have made their names by selling whistles at $50-75, and stuck with it for years, until they eventually develop a following, grow a multi-year waiting list, and then expand their prices once their whistles start making bank on the secondhand Ebay market--i.e. "I got a John Sindt whistle this week after a 3 year wait for $65. Avoid the wait and have it now for $200." At least, that's typically how I've seen people grow the business in the 20 years I've been following it.
That's assuming, of course, that the quality of the work creates such demand that you end up with that kind of waiting list. But all quality irish music instrument makers (flute, uilleann pipe, whistle) have a long list. The market is larger than the makers can supply. If you consistently make a good product, it only takes 3-5 years to cement your reputation and start building up that waiting list.
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Grabbed the kindle fire and shot some video of that first whistle I described above.
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Hey now, you're crushing his schtick.And before Gasbandit asks...
Yes, I've eaten a hairy sausage
--Patrick
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_for_a_Rest
Well, I can already play the first two of those, and could probably learn the 3rd..so probably