First Steps

Having gotten hold of some electrical conduits of various internal diameter, I began to follow the directions in the plans that I had downloaded. One of my pipe sizes fit the bill perfectly for making a low D whistle, so I decided that was my project.

Firstly I had to find a cylindrical piece of wood that would function as the fipple block. The fipple is the part in the whistle mouthpiece that forces the air to flow against the lip of the windway, thus producing the sound (the wooden bit in the photo above).

The photo above, by the way, is taken from the plans I was using, and the fipple block above is made of beechwood, lathed and sanded down to the correct size so as to fit almost perfectly into the pipe. My fipple block, on the other hand, was a piece of rake handle...