Slowly Learning Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic)

I've been having fun learning Gaeilge and thought some readers might be thinking about it too, so I thought I'd mention how it's going. 


In a word "mall" meaning "slow." Not so much because it is hard, the language is very organized and un-ambiguous (unlike English.) It's just very different. Spoken Irish has different sounds from English, so that takes a little getting used to, and they use combinations of letters to make some sounds we have single letters for. For example "V" and "W" which do not exist in their alphabet. (The missing letters are: j k q v w x y z. )

Broad consonant	Pronounced	Slender consonant	Pronounced
bh	Eng. "w"	bh	Eng. "v"

(thanks to standingstones.com)


How do you know if the "bh" you are looking at is a broad or slender consonant? That's straightforward - if the closest vowel is a slender vowel (i, e) the consonant is slender, and if the closest vowel is broad (a, o, u) then the consonant is broad too. 


They do have two ways to pronounce vowels - long and short. If it's long, it has a fada, or an accent mark like this: á or í. You have to look close at the "i" to see if it's a dot or a fada. 


But that's basically it. Once you learn the rules and how to pronounce the sounds the rest is just like learning any other language, adding vocabulary as you go along. 


And of course that goes better if you have people to speak it with or at least listen to. And there are Gaeilge programs on the web. A good one is http://tg4.ie/ie/index.html. 

As for learning, I think  http://www.bitesizeirishgaelic.com has a very good approach and you can start and stop as your schedule demands. It is operated by a husband and wife team who are very nice and helpful people. Check them out. 


So if you are at all interested in Gaeilge, do some wandering around the web and see what strikes your fancy. 


Slán go fóill. 


Is mise le mas,


Carey

Feedback Word Cloud

Looking thru some e-mails I saw a mention of this Wordly.net site that will create word clouds from straight text. What would anyone want to do with that?  Well, after a few moments I though about tossing in the 20 or so feedback e-mails that I've received from customers which are scrolling on my home page. And here's the result:

(Click image to enlarge)

I like it! I think it needs to go on my home page for a while.

Caloosahatchee Celtic Festival

Last Saturday the Caloosahatchee Celtic Festival was held in downtown Fort Myers. The usual Celtic goods and good food were present as was a mix of local and imported talent. Here is a long shot from the pavilion near he river:

The weather was perfect, the beer cold, and the entertainment very entertaining. Jaime, the instructor at a local Irish dance school took on one of the fiddlers in an impromptu speed contest. The applause-o-meter said Jaime won by a wide margin:

Jaime and her troop often dance for us (The Boys Of County Lee) at various events and when Wednesday is not a school day, the whole class will stop in at the pub where we have our Tuesday evening seisún and dance among the diners. Good fun! They do well in the national competitions too. 




All the acts were great, but I especially enjoyed the Celtic roots rockers Rathkeltair. They did a few covers and a lot of original stuff. 

So Saturday was consumed at the festival, Sunday played a brunch gig at The Bay House in North Naples from 11-2 with a group of friends (some of which were on stage at the festival but I didn't get a pic) then I beat it up US 41 to North Fort Myers to catch what I can of the seisún at T P Hoolihan's pub. Monday was a birding excursion to Circle-B-Bar Reserve. Tuesday was catch up on e-mails and play the Tuesday seisún at Ballyourney, followed by a Wednesday seisún at The Dublin Ale House. 


Whew. I hope you are having as much fun as I am. 

New Profile Pic From Savannah Visit

I finally got tired of my profile photo. It's been so long they've painted the pub yellow and removed that bench. The current photo, which is posted in this post so after I change it again folks will know what I'm talking about, was taken in May 2011 when we stopped in Savannah on our way to McGee Marsh in Ohio for the spring warbler migration. I'm playing one of my Bb whistles.

This is what www.historic-savannah.com has to say about this monument:

Historical Marker
Savannah's Irish and Robert Emmet Park

Once known as the Strand and later as Irish Green because of its proximity to the Irish residents of Savannah's Old Fort neighborhood, this park was renamed in 1902 for the Irish patriot Robert Emmet (1778-1803) to commemorate the centennial of his death. Emmet, who led an unsuccessful Dublin uprising for Irish independence and was executed for treason, was a hero to Savannah's Irish community. Emmet is best known for the speech in which he asked that his epitaph not be written until "my country takes her place among the nations of the earth.” Emmet Park remains an important center of ceremonial congregation for Savannahians of Irish descent.

Erected by the Georgia Historical Society and the St. Patrick's Day Parade Committee.

You can click the image to view it larger, when you can read 

To Americans of Irish descent 

Past - Present - Future

Erin Go Bragh

Here's what the whole monument looks like:

There was a lot more Irish going on in Savannah than I expected. Their St Patrick's Day Committee has a permanent brick-and-mortar office with a really cool sign.

Well, it's been another period of no posts. I seem to go in spurts like that, sharing what's going on and then focusing on actually doing things, and not communicating about it. But I'm like that I suppose. My wife says when I get interested in something I focus on it. 


I have not made any real progress on the black whistles because while the mandrel approach does work, it is somewhat unpredictable. Maybe it's lack of practice on my part, but sometimes I get a nice looking mouthpiece and sometimes I wrinkle it as I'm trying to get it to slip over the mandrel. I think it's due in part to the mandrel not being heated and cooling the part before it's fully expanded, causing it to bind. I may try making a mandrel with passages for the hot air so I can keep the mandrel warm from the inside and possibly improve the repeatability of the forming. 


But, then how to get the parts off and allow them to cool? The seem to do best when allowed to cool on the mandrel, but this will mean each mouthpiece will take a LONG time to make compared to turning and parting on the lathe. The temperature of the shop compared to the temperature of the mandrel causes varying amounts of shrinking while the part cools off the mandrel. 


So this is the main technical hurdle at the moment. The other reason for a lack of progress on the black whistles is the need to make white whistles for customer and dealer orders for the holidays. At one point I had a backlog of over 100 whistles, not counting multiple bodies for most of those. I'm not complaining! But I believe existing orders come before R&D, so not much R&D has been done. 


But with the holidays past I'm about to catch up - in fact I hope to ship all outstanding orders today, or at least have them ready to ship tomorrow. And then I'll get back on the black whistle project, and hopefully let you know how it's going from time to time. Maybe I'll set a reminder in my things to do to prompt me to post....

Mouthpiece Methods

For a couple days I've been trying different approaches to making the mouthpiece for the black Every Whistle. It's not a case of how to make one, but rather how to make them in production mode. The more uniform the better, and the quicker the better. 

I had made one whistle by simply splitting a section of pipe and slipping it over the head. This worked, but the pipe didn't really want to stay round when spread that much. It would go a little oval, and impact the windway height. 

I was thinking of trying some heat to relax the plastic after splitting it to see if it came into a round section easily. Jem mentioned that the plastic can be expanded enough to fit over it's original OD with heat on a mandrel. So I bought a heat gun and had a go at several approaches. 

Two mandrels

The first mandrel was made from aluminum bar and looked really nice all polished up to eliminate extra friction. The problem was, aluminum conducts heat really well, and the mouthpiece would cool as it was pushed over the mandrel, requiring heating one or two more times. The good news is the aluminum doesn't have a high specific heat, so it warmed up quickly and things worked pretty well once the mandrel was warm. I considered, and am still keeping on the back burner, fitting the mandrel to a heat source such as a soldering iron. It could be threaded on in place of the soldering tips. But that might be more work than it's worth.

I thought a Delrin mandrel might work better, leaving more heat in the mouthpiece. So I made one out of Delrin, and it did work a better. Good enough that it shouldn't be too hateful to make a couple dozen at a time. But it also worked nicely to split the mouthpiece and heat it on a mandrel to shape it for the whistle. 

While I was trying different techniques to make the mouthpiece, I was trying different ways of finishing the whistles. 

 Here are three whistles with different treatment of the logo. The left one is painted with cream paint that matches the color of the CPVC I have locally. The middle one is simulating a gray paint. It is really polishing compound left in the engraved logo. The right one is as it comes from the engraver with no treatment by me at all.

 Here is a more distant view of the whistles. The one in the middle was treated with sandpaper and steel wool while on the lathe to make a brushed finish going around the whistle. It reminds me of uni-directional carbon fiber or fiber glass. Not bad looking. Lighter than the native black color. The one on the right is a white color, and no logo in on that whistle because it is the original prototype.

 Here's a long view of the various color and mouthpiece options. 

 Here you can see the second from the left has the split mouthpiece treatment. 

They all play alike, so it's down to how it looks and how easy is it to make over and over again.

I think I'll take some time out from the mouthpiece R&D to lay out the finger holes and make playable whistles out of the ones made so far. 

More R than D

I'm somewhat stymied at the moment. Not that I can't make a whistle, but that I can't find material the color and size of material I would like to use. 

All I really have that I can put to use directly, using the approach in the white Every Whistle, is white. The cream fitting (far right) that I hoped to use is of course the size of the pipe OD, and to achieve the wind way height that I want I need to reduce the OD of the pipe a few thousandths of an inch. Which makes the fitting too big to fit properly.

I also thought that I could use a section of the black pipe split in the back and fit over the head to make the mouthpiece. Not so easy. This pipe is not as stiff as the CPVC, but it is more so than the clear pipe I use for the Ghost whistle. The result being the mouthpiece doesn't stay round, but goes oval, with the sharper ends on the sides and the flatter spot opposite the split in the back. This makes the wind way too thin and might make the attachment of the mouthpiece tenuous. It stays on OK for the moment, but if the whistle is dropped I worry that it might come adrift because it doesn't have enough contact area to cement it in place.

So, the only color combination I can confidently produce at the moment is the pure(ish) white on black. Which was my least favorite option. But I might have to start liking it.

I'm going to try working the section of black pipe so it conforms to the shape of the whistle head a little better. That might be the best option. The logo on the dubh-dubh whistle above is as it comes from the engraver. I might like to fill it with something, even if it's a different kind of dubh. For example, if the whistle is finished in gloss black, paint with flay black, or the other way round.

Regardless, for a name I'm now considering "Every Dubh" (Pronounced sorta like: Duv) so the Every family will have the "Every" and the "Every Dubh" available in the same keys and sets. Yes, I plan to do an "Every Dubh Walkabout" in C and D. What order these will all come about in I can't say. I am thinking about making some of the keys or color combinations made to order.

Yesterday on the way home from the session I picked up the dubh whistles I dropped at the engravers the week before. 

Here's the batch on the workbench - a dozen D whistles, and a dozen each of C and Eb bodies with which to make sets as needed. My approach is to do as little work as possible before engraving so if anything goes awry during engraving I have lost a minimum of work. 

Below is a close-up of the logo. I asked for the engraving to be done rather deep so I could fill it with a lot of paint and it wouldn't rub off. 

Before they are whistles, I need to turn the ID and OD of the top of the whistles to accept the fipple and mouthpiece, cut the wind ways, file the labium ramps, assemble the heads, drill the finger holes and voice the whistles. So don't get impatient, most of the work is yet to be done. 

Which Is Heavier?

I made a comment in response to a post on Chiff & Fipple which suggested the black whistles would be lighter than the white whistles. Jem, who has handled both thought the opposite. So I thought I'd find out. I trimmed a length of both pipes to the length of a C body and went looking for my gram balance to weigh them on. 


Oh darn, that's right, I sold that a year ago. Hmm.... how to fairly compare them? They seem so close, a subjective bounce-in-the-hand approach isn't going to work.  Maybe I could float them and see which floats higher? The OD is so very similar. But the black pipe is just enough smaller that a pair of calipers clamped on the pair holds the black pipe and lets the white slide thru. Just. 


Obviously I need a constant OD thing to float to compare the two. Well, lookie there, a section of PVC pipe. Imagine me having a section of PVC pipe lying around. I taped the bottom closed and floated each test piece in water. 

Darn near the same. The black line, submerged in the photo above, is where the water level of the black pipe fell, and the blue line is the white pipe. For practical purposes they are the same weight. I am going to use the same machining dimensions for the two pipes, so aside from the very minor differences in the weight of the material I will remove, the weight of the two whistles will end up the same for practical purposes. 


So now we know. 


Which brings up a related story. I once owned a kayak that was yellow deck over a yellow hull. When I weighted it, it was four pounds heavier than the factory spec. So I called them and asked if that could possibly mean the boat was holding water in the fiberglass or something. "Hmmm... is the boat yellow by any chance?"  "Well, yes, it is." "That explains it. Yellow boats are heavier than other colors."  "What?" "The yellow gel coat is more translucent than the other colors, and we have to put on a thicker layer to keep the fiberglass from showing through."  


So now you know.  

First Dozen To The Engraver

Just a quick note to report the contents were intact and there is enough pipe to make 104 D whistles plus a lesser number of C and Eb bodies. I made up a dozen D whistle blanks, C and Eb bodies and dropped them off at the engraver yesterday. I should have them back next Sunday.

I didn't want to commit any more pipe at this stage, since I may find I want to adjust the length of this part or that before making more.

I took some photos but they are stuck in the camera. I can't find the cable with which to let them out.

But I do have a sound sample of the prototype which uses all the notes below 2nd octave C: Carey playing three jigs.

Take care,

Carey