HOW I MADE A PENNYWHISTLE AT HOME IN MY SPARE TIME

Eric Reiswig ww270@freenet.victoria.bc.ca

(Latest revision: August 1995; Please leave this header on when/if you distribute this file. Thanks.)

Converted to HTML with additional comments by Mr. Phillip: September 1996
I searched DejaNews for Tin Whistle and found this netnews post. I decided to give it a try and had so much fun that I converted the post to HTML and added my two cents.

First, a disclaimer: This document isn't meant to be a definitive guide on 'How to do it.' Rather, the idea is more of a descriptive 'How I did it.' To me, the major goal of whistle-making is personal empowerment, so I feel good when I can spread it around and help others to make their own instruments! Please do give it a try.

Preliminaries

I make my whistles in ordinary copper plumbing pipe. I use the 1/2 inch diameter for the smaller whistles (D down to Bb) and the 3/4 inch for the larger sizes (low G down to D). There is no difference between the two other than size. (ie. all the methods are the same.) It's important to start out with a piece of pipe longer than needed, since it's easy to cut bits off, and hard to put 'em back!

There have been some questions about the use of copper tubing, as related to health issues. I've tried to find out what, if any, risk playing a copper whistle poses: The nutritional RDA for copper is something like 2mg, and you're not going to absorb too much by playing a copper whistle. There is a condition called Wilson's disease where copper apparently poses a larger risk.

Mr. Phillip says...A final coating of lacquer spray will minimize copper exposure, but think about it... this is plumbing pipe for your drinking water [can't be too bad].

Note as well that it's not necessary to use copper pipe. Any easily- available tubing will work just fine. I remeber Paddy Keenan saying that he used to make whistles out of TV aerial antennas. Differences in the diameter of the tubing will make small differences in overall length and hole placement, so keep this in mind when selecting your tubing. Work carefully, and don't be afraid to experiment.

Any time you cut the metal tubing, it leaves little bits of metal ('burrs,' I think they're called) stuck around. TAKE ALL OF THESE OFF, with a file, &c. They interfere with the windway, and generally make your life difficult.

The design I've come up with is an adaptation of the ClarkeŽ brand tin whistle, which uses a simple wooden block {fipple} inserted at the end. (NOT the new 'Sweetone' model, which has a plastic mouthpiece.) It's quite useful and instructive to examine the differences between the ClarkeŽ brand and the other, plastic-headed brands. My whistles end up being a sort of hybrid, sharing features of each type.

The mouthpiece

This is the important part. In general, the ClarkeŽ mouthpiece is a good place to look if you're unsure about something.

The first thing to do is to make one end of the pipe as square as you can, for a length of about 1 1/4 inches. I do this by whacking the pipe with a hammer, on the concrete floor in my basement. The cross-section won't have corners as sharp as the ClarkeŽ, but that's ok. All you really need is one flat(ish) side, which will be the top of the windway.

Now, take this side, and cut a slit across it, about an inch from the top. The slit should go just about all the way across the pipe, and should be about 3/16 inch wide.

Mr. Phillip says... I found it handy to cut two parallel strips and then a diagonal to join them both. Like so... N this allows easier removal of the center chunk. Roll back the points and hack them off.

The lower edge of the slit is called the lip, and it's the place where the sound is made. To do this, it needs to be in the path of the incoming air. What I do is as follows: take a large nail punch (about 1/4 inch across) and start hitting the lip with a hammer and this punch. Watch carefully, and try to get the lip to go straight across the top of the tube. This is important. If you sight through the mouthpiece of a ClarkeŽ whistle, you'll notice that the lip is curving across the windway, since the tin has just been pushed down. This is what we want to avoid. You want the lip to be as straight as possible.

The next step is to make the fipple (wooden block) which defines the windway. Get a piece of hardwood, preferably with one flat face, which will be the top of the block. It helps if the block is 4-5 inches long, so you can hold it while carving. Carefully whittle away the wood, until it fits tightly into the mouthpiece. The windway should be 1/16 inch to 1/8 inch high, and fairly flat (if you got the end of the pipe nice and square). The most important thing here is that the windway have approximately the same height all the way along, and that, looking through the bottom end of the pipe, you be able to see a small crack of light through the mouthpiece. I generally find it best not to push the fipple all the way up to lip-hole, but to let the tube overhang it by a small amount.

You can test whether the mouthpiece works by blowing through it. It's a bit tricky when the fipple is sticking out the end of the tube by a few inches, but holding the whistle sideways, like a flute, and covering the end of the mouthpiece with your mouth, it should be possible to sound a note. Blowing harder sounds the octave, and you might be able to get still another octave. It takes a fair bit of practice to make a decent fipple, and you might have to make 2 or 3 per whistle, and choose the best-fitting one, &c.

The fipple/windway is the most important step in getting a decent tone. If the tone isn't solid enough, it often helps to take the fipple out and sand down the top, to increase the height of the windway, and let more air pass through. So it seems better to make the fipple so that the windway is quite shallow, and then steadily strengthen the tone by sanding it down, until it plays where you want it.

Once you can get a sound out of it, leave it alone for the moment. If you want to make a 2-section whistle, you can cut off the mouthpiece part, about 1/3 of the way down the pipe, and solder a copper pipe joint to the mouthpiece section. These are pretty inexpensive, and fit tightly enough to make the whistle tunable to some degree. (If you're not using plumbing pipe, you can often find tubing in a variety of sizes at a hobby store, and use this to join the sections.)

Tuning & finger holes

This part is easier, but can get fairly tedious. Unless you have perfect pitch, I strongly advise using a chromatic, electronic tuner for this. A general note: the whistle gets sharper as it warms up, so before cutting any parts, blow through the whistle for a minute or two, and make sure of the pitch when it is warm.
Mr. Phillip says...Bummer, bummer... My BananaŽ Quartz Guitar Tuner would only pick up a few notes on my ClarkeŽ, so I sort'a gave up on using it to tune my own creation.

The first thing is to cut the pipe to length. If you used enough pipe, it should be flat of the note you want. (Without finger holes, it sounds the lowest note. ie. no finger holes = all holes covered.) To sharpen the note, you have to cut the pipe off at the bottom. Cut off only a small amount at time, so as not to go too sharp. As you approach the desired note, use a file instead of a hacksaw, so you can really have control over how much metal gets taken off the bottom.

Once you have the pipe tuned to the correct key, carefully measure the lip-to-foot length of the pipe. Assuming you play the whistle with your left hand on top, and numbering your fingers (1=index finger, &c), the holes are placed as follows: L1 (the top hole) goes 44.7% of the way down from the lip to the foot. The holes go down as follows:

I arrived at these figures by measuring a number of commercially-available whistles of different sizes. The proportions were quite uniform. However, there is a lot of variability permitted in finger hole size vs. position: moving a hole up a bit lets it be smaller. (A good candidate for this is R2 on a low-G whistle, which tends to be quite large, unless you 'fudge' it upwards a bit.) Also, the diameter of the tubing will make a difference in hole placement and size.

Cut each hole with an electric drill. (Draw a straight line down the tube, mark hole positions, and use a 16 penny nail to make a starting divot.) The important thing to keep in mind is to make each hole smaller than you need it. Once all the holes are cut, get out some round files and some gloves. It's time for some elbow grease. You now have to open up each hole to the correct size. Start with the bottom hole. (A good idea is to stick in some of that plastic coat-hanger rod protector, to keep the files from scratching the bore of the pipe too badly. (ya lost me here, dude) Take it out when playing the whistle, though, since it flattens the pitch, confusing the heck out of you. :) Play the bottom note, which should be on pitch. Now, remove your R3 finger, and see what note it plays. If the note is flat, the hole is too small, so open it up a bit with a round file. (If it's sharp, it's too late, time to start over. If you're happy with the mouthpiece, though, you can re-use it: cut it off and use a pipe joint to add a new barrel.) Opening the upper edge of the hole moves the center of the hole upward and minimizes the final size of the hole, so try to open holes upward, instead of making them bigger all around. Keep going until the note is on pitch. Then do the same for the remaining holes, R2, R1, L3, L2, L1, in that order.

Mr. Phillip says...I made R1 and R3 smaller than the others for the same reasons that ClarkeŽ does.

You have some control here over the 'voicing' of the whistle. Blowing harder raises the pitch of a given note (I'm not talking about jumping the octave, here), so pay attention and try to make all the notes on pitch with the 'correct' breath pressure.

Another thing to do is smooth the edges of the finger holes, so they're not too rough to play comfortably.

The mouthpiece, revisited

Once you've got all the holes done, it's time to finish the mouthpiece. It's a good idea to do this last since you can clean out all the dust, &c that you get while filing the holes out. If the whistle is in two sections, this isn't a worry: you can finish the mouthpiece whenever you want, since it's short enough to clean by itself, and the body of the whistle is then open at both ends for cleaning.

Cut away the bottom part of the mouthpiece so it forms an angle that you can get into your mouth. Insert the fipple (still long & sticking out, I hope) where it plays the best, and drill a small hole through the mouthpiece from side to side. This should not damage the windway; it should go through the body of the fipple.

Now is the time to cut the fipple to size. Remove it from the whistle, and cut off the excess, and sand the outer face (where your lower lip goes) smooth. An idea here is to roughly cut away the back of the block, then stick it back into the whistle and use a power sander to grind the fipple down to be flush with the end of the pipe. (I use a sanding drum on my electric drill for this.)

Mr. Phillip says...I used a belt sander for both the primary fipple shaping and the later grinding the fipple and pipe to fit my mouth (the forming of the beak). The copper, being rather soft is easily shaped this way (It will however get hot, don't burn your fingers ! Do it in steps to allow cooling.). "If the low notes are very weak (almost inaudible), remove the fipple and increase the chamfer (a little angle in the fipple at the end of the airway) or sand the fipple lower. If the high notes will not blow, you have sanded the fipple too low." (K. Forrester, American Woodworker 1990) In other words make sure you are happy with the total tone before you cement the fipple in place, you may want to make another one.

I use 5-minute epoxy to glue the mouthpiece together. Actually, if you use a nail through the mouthpiece, the glue serves more to seal the edges of the fipple against air leakage, rather than providing any structural support. Put some glue in the mouthpiece (staying well away from the windway) as well as in the nail holes, and push the fipple in place. Then push the nail through the hole, and wipe away any excess glue. Once the glue dries, it's done!

Mr. Phillip says...My fipple fit so tightly that I didn't have to use either the epoxy or the nail. I suggest that you try just indenting the metal into the wood by tapping a nail point into the copper.

Sanding the metal to remove any paint or grime makes the whistle quite attractive. An appropriate polish really makes it glow! Decoration is up to you: paint, etch, engrave, whatever, to your heart's content! :) I generally give the mouthpiece a light coating of clear nail polish, to help seal the wooden fipple.

Mr. Phillip says...Sand with ultra fine paper, then buff with fine steel-wool till it glows, then seal with clear lacquer spray finish.

The Whistle

With a little time, patience and talent, you too can turn a length of plumbing pipe into a fine copper whistle such as the one pictured here.

The end (whew!)

But there is more...I saw some Honduran guys playing in the French Quarter on bamboo whistles. Instead of a fipple, they just had a notch cut in the very end of the wooden tube. They used their lower lip to block most of the passage way, and focused the air stream right at that V shaped notch. Another observation that I made was that the finger holes on their pipes were much larger than what I am accustomed to seeing on commercial whistles. One of the guys said that their whistles were kin to a traditional Japanese instrument (he told me the name but I promptly forgot it). OK, hollow tube, V-notch, holes in it. I made one out of some PVC I found. I easily formed a uniform notch by using a belt sander. Please refer to the above note about having a good electronic tuner, it will save you some time and frustration.

Please send any comments, questions, suggestions, anecdotes, &c. you might have, so we can learn from each other!

Eric Reiswig ww270@freenet.victoria.bc.ca

(Again, please leave my address down here if you pass this file on.)