If you use a calculator to locate your hole size and placement, you can make the tone holes before making the mouthpiece. If you want to finish tuning by hand you can intentionally make the holes smaller so you can enlarge them until they are tuned how you want. I find the Bracker whistle calculator works amazingly, so I just use that and make my tube first. I make all my whistles tunable though so I'm not sure if I end up sliding it a bit to be in tune. But when Its done the intonation is very good.David Cooper wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 10:21 am That's the same problem I've had with the the last two prototype quenas that I've made: they produced two beautiful notes an octave apart until I started making the holes, but by the time all the holes were there, the sound quality had turned more to hiss than whistle. I've now managed to recover them both by reducing the window length (which is easy with a quena as you just file the end down to get your lips closer to the wedge, though it takes a lot of courage to make each adjustment when you know you can't reverse it). The mere presence of the holes must disturb the sound waves sufficiently to reduce the range of viable window lengths, so perhaps starting out with a movable fipple would help to avoid this problem and help nail down the ideal position for it.
I'd think it would work similarly for a Quena.