Moving right along!
It’s been just a moment since I launched the shop officially, but I’ve already had a surprising number of orders and positive feedback, both from friends and folks I’ve never met. It’s been a good experience re-examining the workflow and getting everything from printing to mailing out into an organized fashion, and it feels awesome to wake up and go, “Ok, I know exactly what I have to get done today.” A nice change from when all this was quite speculative!
I’ve also started building the “resources” section of the website, which will house care sheets, helpful guides, and links to the work of others that has helped me along the way!
The number of orders has given us confidence to get a little desktop CNC machine for the pretuning hole layout, which is different between classic and session fang models. Our current pilot drill system is not the easiest to get centered, and I have to do a lot of bulk material removal before we’re even at the point of fine-tuning the, well, tuning of the instrument. I slashed the daylights out of my left thumb the other day as well, so having a repeatable way to get the holes very near to their final size will be a big step forward, both in terms of aesthetic quality and the number of instruments we’re able to make in a week.
Two local music stores have expressed interest in carrying Barter Loch whistles, which is equal parts terrifying and awesome. The aforementioned CNC machine will be helpful for making wholesale price whistles for retail feasible, as well.
The bronze whistles are nearly finalized - they’re done acoustically, but aesthetically we have been struggling. The problem is that the only stock tubing we can get right now doesn’t match the kind of rosy gold of the silicon bronze; it’s got more of a sickly green cast when compared. So, we needed a repeatable way to color the body tube to make it look as nice as it sounds. Both home nickel plating and oxide coatings are really tough; it usually takes us a few tries to get it right, which is not super efficient. Right now I think the best candidate for the final pieces is a black instrument lacquer that should hold up against the demands of the stage. We’re also exploring some powder coatings, which are the most wear-resistant but also not very friendly to apply to cylindrical objects.
Nick has been looking into making our own tubing, and we’ve had some preliminary success lost-wax casting some reasonably thin-walled body tubes. Our concern there is just that the overall weight of the instrument might be excessive, and have too much thermal mass during performance. We are trying to optimize our metal and flask temperature to go thinner!
We’ve also made some interesting discoveries regarding the properties of our home-alloyed silicon bronze, like precipitation-hardening for even brighter tone, and getting thin-film oxide layers to make some truly unique pieces!