Chiff and Fipple Forums

... is finally getting a move along with keys for the finger holes designed, fabricated and installed.
My chief consideration in all this was to keep it simple; design, materials and construction to suit that constraint.
The most important first choice was that of materials, the use of plumbing pipe with the right diameter made a curved hinge design easy. Perspex hinges glue onto that surface quite easily and strongly, and the use of a shared pin through the two gave me the idea for the spring mechanism. All that was required is a rubber band stretched between two glued-on anchor points, the stand off over the pin gives the right angles for the band to be effective as a key opener. The last component to fall into place was a small toggle, also on the shared pin, to control the degree to which the hinge will open.
Really, the project was completed with a small saw, a file for cleaning up and a drill for the hole in the toggle. Everything that needed to be attached is simply glued on. Wonderful stuff superglue!
I've put some pics of the whistle and keys onto the syn whistles Facebook page, also a small video to show how it sounds. Hopefully some more sound tracks will appear once I have a working microphone for the computer.

The video doesn’t show up for me, but the pictures do. Looks like a metal bassoon a bit. I look forward to seeing and hearing more.

That's where Boehm's mechanism comes in handy: the size of human hands isn't a consideration of how low you can go.

Here's the world's biggest flutes, the subcontrabass, what, three octaves below a Low D whistle?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9Nz0UGuQyc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qmxnp_3KUt0

I tried a contrabass at a flute convention, it played like a dream, two octaves below a Low D whistle, easy to finger and easy to fill with air.