Cleaning Your Wicked Good Whistle • Three Different Ways

This is a simple way to make an excellent cleaning tool for all size whistles. The materials are a 3/16" wooden dowel and a long strip of cotton cloth.

The 3/16" wooden dowel costs $.78 cents at our local Lowes and is 48" long. You will have plenty of material to make two extra long cleaning rods that will fit up to a Low D whistle.

I use a white 100% cotton cleaning towel and tear it into 2" strips the long length of the towel.

One towel is enough to last a long time, so you can be neighborly and share with a friend if you like. If you have an old pillow case, that will work well and it can be any color you have on hand.

I recommend 100% cotton because you will not get lint when you buff the bore of the whistle coming off and getting into the fingerholes and tuning joint.

You will need to cut the slot in the end of the dowel with a sharp, fine tooth saw. I use the bandsaw to do the slot, but you can use a craft saw, coping saw, scroll saw or perhaps a neighbor might cut the slot for you. If you do not wish to cut a slot (I like the slot so I can change the cloth often), you can use a dab of Elmer's Glue and wrap your cloth around the dowel and glue it on.

Wrap the cloth smoothly down the dowel by turning to the right with the dowel and feeding the cloth flat and pulling to the bottom of the dowel. Wrap enough cloth around the dowel so that it fits nicely into the bore of your whistle and let the tail end of the cloth pull down to the end of the dowel. Do not make the cloth fit too tightly or it can make a plug of cloth and be hard to remove.

The tail end of the cloth should be left loose and hang outside the whistle so you can pull the cloth out of the whistle if it should come unattached from the cleaning end of the dowel.

When cleaning and drying your whistle, you can push and pull the rod back and forth or using both hands, spin it in the whistle bore.

If you want to use your electric drill, put the drill in forward mode (the same direction you would use to drill a hole with a drill bit) and push and pull back and forth to buff the whistle bore.

If you forget and buff with the drill in reverse, the cloth will unwind and probably come off the dowel. This means you will have to pull on the tail end of the cloth and retrieve your buffing cloth out of the whistle bore. Rewind your dowel and you will be back in business.

You cannot hurt your whistle by buffing the whistle bore. The more times you buff, the smoother the bore will become and the better it will play.

Using a shot gun buff and electric drill to clean your whistle

So many e-mailers wanted a picture of the cleaning setup I had mentioned this spring that I decided to post a picture of my top secret whistle cleaning apparatus. The woolen buff is for a 12 gauge shotgun(fits low whistles with a big bore) and will last a long time. A 410 size buff fits small diameter bore whistles.

You can use any type of drill, but cordless is great if you already own one. Be sure the drill is in tighten mode when you clean with it or the buff will unscrew and be left in the whistle. Several buffing sessions will improve the sound of any kind of whistle because the buffing head smooths the instrument inside and dries up the water.

Doing this type of buffing is not the same as using a clarinet style bore wiper, because the buff generates heat while it is turning and the heat and rotation takes out residue and polishes the inside of the instrument. If you find that your instrument wets up easily in high humidity conditions, dry silicon spray available in hardware and automotive stores can be wiped into the bore after it has been cleaned and then buffed again to produce a finish that will absolutely shed water.

Moisture in the bore will deaden sound quickly if conditions are humid because saliva is not plain water and the surface tension inside the bore makes it collect as a coating on the walls of the instrument. Silicon when buffed onto the surface makes surface tension minimal and improves the instruments internal vibration so you get more volume without having to increase the air flow.

Hold It With A Pony Clamp and Vise Setup

Here is a great little setup that will save you some cash and work for almost any project where you need to hold your work at various angles. I got the idea after pricing gun makers and pattern makers vise for the shop and found they ranged in cost from $150. to over $200.

Continue reading "Hold It With A Pony Clamp and Vise Setup"

Using the Shoe Jig to Make a Shapely Mouthpiece.

The Shoe Jig is a gadget to hold a part when you are grinding or shaping to keep your hands away from moving parts. In the whistle shop, everything has a jig for safety and to make sure the pieces and parts are uniform and correctly shaped. The Shoe Jig holds a piece to grind like a shoe holds your foot...catchy name and descriptive too! This particular jig is made from pine wood plank recycled from a bedstead and has adjustments to fit and hold the whistle mouthpiece tightly. By putting the mouthpiece to be shaped in the jig, every one will be the same curve and length of cut without having to measure them all individually.

Here I am holding a complete mouthpiece, ready to grind the finishing curve on the bottom.

The Shoe Jig ready to be filled with the mouthpiece and placed into the slide vise.

Shoe Jig installed into Slide Vise and mouthpiece being cut to shape with an abrasive drum.

Using the Shoe Jig, you get better results while shortening the time it takes to make a Wicked Good Whistle!

Measuring Up With A Wicked Good Caliper

While going through GarrettWade.com looking for another useful tool or two, I found this giant set of Wicked Good Vernier Calipers (invented by Pierre Vernier, France,1639 for all you history buffs) listed in the woodworking tools. In the whistle shop, everything gets measured and measured and measured...so I was really excited to find this oversize tool. Here is their description and specifications for the calipers.

"Giant 24" Vernier Caliper, a splendid tool, & easily manageable despite its size
When we first discovered this, we were awestruck. There's just no other word to describe the feeling. It seems such an oddly outsized tool, yet take it up in your hand and you will think of a thousand times you could have used just such a useful measuring device. Virtually identical to a machinist's steel caliper, this one is made of aluminum, so it is easily manageable despite it's large size. A terrific find, and irresistible at this price. You'll want one just to watch your friends gawk.
Capacity: 24" long with a 2-3/4" deep jaw. Graduated in inches and millimeters, outside reading only. The Vernier scale reads in 1/128" and 0.05mm."

This is the perfect tool to do repeat measuring and checking parts for size. I am really impressed with all the things it is useful for, like checking board width and thickness in the wood shop, the distance on sound hole to whistle butt to check initial tuning and the list can go on and on. You will enjoy how light and easy to set these calipers are. Quick measurements require using only one hand to set and hold the slide when checking several measurement on your project. You can purchase this tool without having to take a loan out on your house...$29.95 is a great bargain.

Here I am checking the length of a Low F to make sure there is a good allowance for tuning up and down. The calipers do this job well and are extremely accurate. The whistles in the top row on the wall are on lengths of slide whistle rods that were too short to use and the whistles hanging are in clips made from left over thumb ring parts. Waste not, want not...keep America green!

Wicked Good Magnetic V Block

Originally I made the tuning slide on a wooden jig in the drill press, not unlike the setup shown in the photo. The slide requires the bore of the piece of pipe to be cut to a slide fit about two thirds of the way in the pipe. This bore must be very straight with the pipe, cleanly cut, and most importantly, easy to do, because every Low D has to have one. The original jig I used was clever, but slow to load and cranky to get set up and cutting accurately.

When I discovered a magnetic V block in the Grizzly catalog, I got the idea it would be great to set up for doing drilling jobs like the tuning slide. The V block has a switch that turns the magnet on and off and you can set the block on the drill press table or on a slide vise like I show in the photo. The block will not move once the switch is turned on, so you can also use it for a stop or for measuring lengths of cut pieces on your table saw. It is a very handy gadget and Grizzly sells them for about $8. in the catalog. I probably sound like I work for Grizzly, but after looking for stuff everywhere, they usually have it in stock for a good price.

I set the V block on center in the slide vise and align the piece to be drilled with the laser so the drill is true to the bore. The slide vise pushes the pipe into the V block and self centers it into the V. This is a fast and accurate way to drill or ream pipe and it sets up fast!

Try a magnetic V block and speed up the setup on your next job!

Make You Wood Lathe into a Wicked Good Machine Lathe for $100.

There are three full sized wood lathes in the shop. They all have a long history going back to about 1940 and I obtained them when they had been replaced by newer equipment.

Continue reading "Make You Wood Lathe into a Wicked Good Machine Lathe for $100."

Spray Booth Box from Staples is Wicked Good!

Several of the folks I talked with on the phone in the past couple of months inquired what kind of gadgets I used to make different parts in a whistle. I thought it might be interesting to show a few time saving and interesting setups that are used in the shop.

Continue reading "Spray Booth Box from Staples is Wicked Good!"

Self Masking System Makes Airbrushing Wicked Easy!

Air brushing the whistles gives a great looking finish!

 

The WhistleSmith shop has been very busy this summer and this newsletter is way overdue. I have been making steady improvements in the shop that directly effect the flow of instruments and the amount of time spent on producing finished parts.

Continue reading "Self Masking System Makes Airbrushing Wicked Easy! "

Deburring Tools Give Wicked Good Results!

Many of the tools I use on whistles cannot be bought in a store. A lot of time over the past few years has been spent inventing all kinds of clamping, cutting, grinding and shaping jigs and hold downs. Many of the knives and grinding tools have had to be searched for and altered to do specific jobs on whistle components. I have used deburring tools on whistles for some time now and they are great little gadgets for cleaning up the loose ends and removing plastic and metal burrs from pipe for a nice finished look. Resharpening these tools is possible, but I find the results are mixed no matter how carefully you hone the blade,

Continue reading "Deburring Tools Give Wicked Good Results!"

Wicked Good Whistle Making Gadgets and the All Mighty Dollar!

 

Here is a picture of one of the new cross slide vises that I have been using. Available at Woodcraft. com, it is a really nice piece of machinery. When bolted onto your drill press, the Bitmoore slide vise allows you to mill and drill with extreme accuracy. The vise is usually about $79 and sometimes is on sale for less. If you do woodworking it is absolutely the best. Combined with a laser drill press, I can do precision work without having to work hard to do it. How about that!

Continue reading "Wicked Good Whistle Making Gadgets and the All Mighty Dollar!"