I see my flageolet efforts are being cited - thanks for the heads-up, stringbed.
I haven't read the whole thread, just the most recent 2 or 3 pages, and and not sure I'm particularly interested in the whole topic! Nor am I sure I have anything very much to contribute here, but I'll try to write a few things which may help...
First just to point out that there is a nice looking anonymous English-made (?Liddle factory style?) pillar mounted 6-key flageolet-piccolo set on eBay currently. Probably a bit over-priced IMO (and not selling and getting relisted because of that - though now open to Best Offer!), but it is complete, beak and all!
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/165949035643. I'd be a little dubious about it being modern pitch - the vast majority of the English made ones are really Old Philharmonic Pitch A 452.4, though some, like my M Barr set, are just about viable tuned down to A440.
Some general responses to some of the points I've read up-thread:
I think you should take note that in historical terms flageolets do not
have to have windcaps to be considered flageolets - and that is of course why Generation have always termed their whistles "flageolets". There's a very useful website on Flageolets in general, detailing the assorted types here:
http://flageolets.com. It has a good structural explanation and history of the English flageolet. 1-keyed or keyless versions are not necessarily reversions from or simplifications of the 4/5/6-keyed examples - they seem to have existed throughout. I'd also note that, where an alternative piccolo head is provided, it is by no means necessarily a bad instrument as a piccolo.
My own favourite modern high D whistle is a boxwood one by Jon Swayne. His whistles are, I think, very much direct descendents of historical examples. They have a conical body bore, like the antique flageolets, though not necessarily with the same taper profile. IMO this bore conicity is probably what makes his whistles superior to my taste to most other wooden whistles with all-cylinder bores. I have plenty of videos of mine on my YouTube and Facebook. You can read Jon's explanation of them on his website:
https://www.jonswayne.com/whistles. They are what I suspect would be described as "very free-blowing" in modern parlance - maybe even freer than Generations, but capable of much more power/volume and supportive of a large throughput of air to create volume without being air-hungry, harsh or hissy, but maybe not quite as free-blowing as a descant recorder, which of course has a significantly wider windway. Personally I very much dislike and in effect cannot play very strangled, resistant whistles like Goldies - even Colin's "free-blowing" models seem very constipated and overly resistant to me and I just make them squeak! (That's my deficiency, no doubt - so many great players love them and make them sound great - but they're not for me.)
Regarding "resistance" to blowing, none of the English flageolets with surviving beaks I have played has been subjectively significantly more resistant than a Generation whistle. The holes through the half dozen surviving bone and ivory beaks in my possession have bore diameters of between 4.05-4.73mm. With that information, Terry, you can make a few! I don't think length is a significant factor affecting air-flow, but they're all between c35-55mm long. Most are bone, not ivory. The narrowest of those is the Barr, which seems comfortably free-blowing to me, though I do notice it has a little more resistance than the bare head. I don't really notice any significant difference in resistance between blowing the whistle head directly or through the beak and windcap on most examples - nor would I expect to unless the bore of the beak was unserviceably narrow.
I have in the past experimented with placing (natural) sponge in the windcap chamber in various ways, and IMO it simply doesn't work - I actually seriously doubt how authentic or common a practice it ever was and suspect it is largely a myth. Even a small piece somehow lodged so it can't blow onto the windway opening can cause serious problems with resistance and control of airflow to overblow etc. and once saturated (which happens quickly) offers no advantage whatever - you just have to keep opening up the windcap to wring it out or swap in a dry piece, which simply isn't worth bothering with.
The main thing I notice when playing a fully assembled windcap flageolet is that, to the player, it seems rather quiet and distant. It took me a while and some experimentation to realise that that is not an experience shared by an in-front auditor. If you take the windcap off and simply blow through the main windway to play just like a normal whistle, the sound will seem normally loud and present to you and comparable to a familiar whistle, but an audience won't notice any significant difference between windcap on or off. It's just to do with the location of the sound emission from the whistle window relative to the player's ears! Holding the fully assembled toot far sideways so it approaches one ear also demonstrates this to the player. Most of the flageolets I have played in good playing condition have been at least as loud as, usually louder than, a good Generation whistle in terms of projection to an audience or recording device.
There are several videos using the M Barr flageolet on my Facebook, including one with a direct comparison between the flageolet and piccolo heads.
This link will take you to those and some other flageolet materials I have posted.
There's a full demo of another anonymous English flageolet I restored some years ago on YouTube here (cf the video blurb for info):
https://youtu.be/-2jQHShRSfw
Some other bits (photos, videos etc.) on flageolets I have posted on Facebook:
Alexander Liddle Flageolet/Piccolo set photo album - this one is unrestored but has its beak. There's a link to a video in the album blurb.
Starck whistle-flageolet - posts including videos and photos of a simple 1-key flageolet, which we would now no doubt simply call a wooden whistle. I have a several other examples, unrestored, of whistle headed keyed flageolet/whistles by French and German makers as well as English. My old mate benhall.1 has or had an antique 6-key all-metal whistle which I seem to recall played quite nicely.
