Chiff and Fipple Forums

And we have to keep in mind that there are tapered bores and TAPERED BORES. When I was trying to get my head around this, I came up with some categorisation of the amount of tapering by dividing them into: Cylinder (ie no taper) Mild Taper, and Stepped Taper (eg three sections of telescoping thin-wa...

I’m looking at nickel plating just the barrel female extension so that when open there’s a continuity of colour with the silver rings. We’ll see how that works out. The 19th century approach was to have brass slides in head and barrel, with a tube of whatever metal was used for rings and keys as a ...

I'm pretty happy with how things are now. Now, I think it's just incremental improvements to the process. Some better finishing tools, etc. I'm printing them in all the colors I have here in at the house, to see which filaments are suitable for making whistles. It turns out, not all of them are. I ...

Looking great, TKing. I started out with brass rings, and then offered a choice of brass or sterling silver, the difference in cost being essentially the difference in metal costs. Interestingly almost everyone opted for the sterling silver. It might just tell me that my flute prices back then were ...

Heh heh, you'll remember I said: What bits are 3D Printed in your example? The head and body presumably. Ferrules (rings)? Tuning slide? (Surely not!) So much relieved to see that now in brass! Well done, Wanderer. And thanks for allowing us to look over your shoulder while you're doing all this. Ve...

And so you can see why I run 3 dust extractors in my workshop, hooked up by a network of pipes and gates to 16 inlets, one or more on every machine. I haven't suffered from any contact issues with flutes, but the dust is a killer, promoting a reaction they term "Snivelling Conjunctivitis"....

Paddler talks about the "sweet spot" in a circular embouchure hole. And we pour all our air down that protruding bit of hole. Presumably that becomes a "sweet strip" in a more rectangular hole. And presumably we fan out our air to play over its longer available space. But then I ...

I've been pondering the other extreme, the rounded rectangle style, as seen on modern Boehms. I used to favour that myself, probably because I took some lessons on the Boehm back in the late sixties, and they rather stuffed me up for a while. So when I did sort out what went wrong and rediscovered m...

Mr Rockstro gives us his typically domineering advice on this: "For a concert flute, the length of the mouth-hole should be 0.5 inch, and its width .42 inch." That translates to 12.7 x 10.7mm; roundness 1.19; area 107. Those figures seem larger than I've generally noted, but he's probably ...

Great stuff Wanderer. Keep us in touch with progress. I've made a few whistles "the hard way", and mill the ramp, using an approximation approach, rotating the head in 5 degree increments. So rather than a perfectly curved ramp yielding a perfectly straight edge (when viewed from above), I...

Hmmm, I had more, but the dreaded Internal Server Error has resurfaced. So here's the leftovers... I was interested to see the curved edge on the bottom of the ramp. I would have thought that not a good idea - that we would want the transit time across the window to be uniform across the window. But...

Wow, that's really exciting, Wanderer. I've long felt that the future of our flute and whistle developments will probably lie in the combination of 3D Printing (or some yet-to-be-developed prototyping technology) and Computer Modelling. You seem to have cracked the first of those! Tunborough, you're...

Terry - one or two things occur to me if you don't mind me asking. Is there an issue with marring the wood when it's gripped by the chuck or is that section cut off at a later point in the process as waste? I only grip the outside of the billet while boring and reaming, so it doesn't matter if it m...

I should also add that most makers seem to not hold their gun drills the way I do, in a carriage-mounted milling attachment, but instead either manage them via the tailstock, advancing by hand, or use some similar approach. I think this choice is driven by the inability to fit the billet inside the...

That link certainly shows what Michael's Low D is capable of. Noting that that is a studio recording not a location recording as it appears. They were canny enough to overdub a few seconds of ambiance at head and tail! So, all wood, fully cylindrical, thin walls, not too large bore. Where do you thi...