Impempe maintenance question

Whistle
1

I have a question for any Impempe owners out there… I’m not sure if they are still in business, BTW. I don’t seem to have Ian Turnbull’s contact info any longer, the website is gone, no recent activity on their Facebook page and no reply to a message there, and there is discussion online about all that. It’s a shame if that is the case… I LOVE my Impempe whistle, and Ian was a really decent fellow to know a bit online.

Anyway, my question:… I picked it up one day and found the tuning slide was frozen. My fault no doubt, let it sit too long, I know AL whistles can ‘fuse’ if you don’t move them regularly. Yesterday I got more serious about fixing it… I popped it in the freezer to see if I could make it move. Next stage in the plan was to heat up the outside part, but no need, I got it to twist. I added a bit f cork grease, but though I could twist it, I could not move it in, or out, much at all. I left it pulled out about a 1/4" while I did a bit of research. This morning I got it all apart.

The whistle has a nylon(?) sleeve about 3/4" long that fits in the tube, and the head portion fits into this. There is a ‘tenon’ at one diameter, and then at the top it gets thicker, then thicker again at the full diameter of the whistle. I am going to clean up all the parts and get rid of any gunk and corrosion… when I do put it back together, thinking on what to put in there for a bit of lubrication… wax, cork grease, a drop of light oil? I’m not sure if there was anything in there originally.

Thoughts?

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If it is nylon, (or plastic), don’t use oil.

In general, cork grease works on most joints, be they cork, neoprene rings, or metal slide.

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I had the same problem with an impempe b flat. Eventually got the head off and the plastic sleeve was a bit of a mess so i removed that and used layers of tape to simulate a new one. It wasn’t ideal and I’m left with a wobbly head…still plays fine.

I’ve 4 impempes, including a couple if b flats ( tubeable and non tuneable) which are far and away my favourite whistle. He also mad me, after pestering, an Alto G and it is sublime.

Not sure what the online discussion about whether he is still making them or not is..if it’s on Reddit then I started that…I do hope he reappears

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I have a C and a D, but I haven’t moved the tuning slides the last year or so (temperature is stable, so the tuning is stable too). I’ll go and check them out when I get home.
I like the D a lot. The C is unfortunately totally different. The windway is 50% wider than the windway on the D, which to me seems excessive for a change just from D to C. The sound is more of air than whistle. If I move the D head to the C body the sound becomes very pure (more so than for the D body), but the fit is not exact so that’s not an option either. Oh well, one out of two isn’t so bad.

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OK: update. I cleaned everything up so it’s shiny and clean, and reassembled it just fine. But, it’s one of those things where I couldn’t remember how it was supposed to be, and when I reassembled it, I found a problem. The whole whistle was flat, and I wasn’t able to close up the tuning slide to fix it… the plastic sleeve fit in the tube fine, and the smaller diameter tube fit into the sleeve okay, but the larger diameter tenon wouldn’t go into the tube. There is a lip on the plastic sleeve, and that seems to be messing it up. I fooled with a bunch of other whistles for reference (Sindt, Humphrey, MacNeil, all with pretty good tuning according to Flutini), and a tuner, and Flutini, and the whistle is definitely flat. Tried both equal and just temperment settings on Flutini. To bring it right, I need to almost close up the whole tuning slide, and I can’t because of the lip on the sleeve… if I take off the sleeve, the head gets wobbly because that thicker tenon is not very long.

I’ve been looking at pictures of Impempe, and also reading this old thread about the Impempe whistle tour. https://forums.chiffandfipple.com/t/how-to-make-a-thread-bookmark/61/1 My whistle is not just LIKE the whistle in the thread… it IS the whistle in the thread. I was the last stop, and I liked it and it stayed here… I offered to pay for it, Ian said no, so I sent him a book on Cape Breton music.

Anyway, if you look at the pictures in Feadoggies review, especially the one showing the head disassembled… there is no lip on the plastic sleeve, and it seems like the sleeve is a part of the head, not the tube, which I had assumed. I had thought the lip was part of the design, but no. Somehow, over time, it has mushroomed. So… I cut it off, lubed it, put it back together, and everything works perfectly. The A note is a bit flat, like Feadoggie mentioned in his review, but that’s for another day… I hardly ever have to tune with an orchestra (never), so I’m happy.

Thanks for the comments, folks. It was all helpful.

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Mr Blister: forgot to mention, yes, Reddit was one place I saw some discussion. Nothing new on the FB site since 2017. Hope he is okay, and also hope he hasn’t given up whistles.

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I had a look at my two Impempe whistles (high D and C), and they have no issues with the tuning slide.
But the OP mentioned a nylon sleeve. There’s no nylon sleeves in my whistles. Just aluminium.

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I’ve a recentish high D and you are right there is no plastic tube over the slide but in an older b flat there is.

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I’m torn on the plastic sleeve. Now it’s fixed, it’s working perfectly, and it eliminates aluminum on aluminum contact. When it was damaged, it was a problem, and it took me a while to figure it out. If it got badly damaged, I don’t know where to find a short length of plastic tube of a very precise inner and outer dimension.

Interested to hear Ian seemingly moved away from the sleeve, ad went to all aluminum. Probably better over all.

The Impempe is the only I have with a tuning slide, except for a MacNeil low whistle. That has the usual teflon tape, and I wish the pre-teflon fit was tighter, TBH. I have a good bit of tape on there, and it’s still a bit looser than I would like. Oh, and an old Merlin if anyone remembers those. The tuning slide is probably the BEST part about that one. Nice tight fit.