What Have I Been Doing?

Wow the time has gone by quick. It's been a month and a half since I told you about moving the lathe, and I've made some good use of it. Initially I had to make some tooling for the lathe and adapt some store-bought stuff to work with it.

I learned some limitations by breaking a mill or two, but I improved my whistle manufacturing process and shaved a little time off each whistle as well. I'm still not back to where I was before I added the step of doing RTTA graphs of each whistle body (that's three tests for a C, D, Eb set) but it's good to do the testing. I know the whistles are better because of it.

I have been a bit backed up on orders because of the lathe adventure, and that was compounded by a problem or three at the engravers where the logo and key are put on. As the saying goes, "what don't kill you makes you stronger." That applies here as well, as we now have a better process between myself and the engraver, and I am upping my stock levels of finished whistles so the larger dealer orders don't cause a bump in the system. Everything is sorted out now, and I have all whistle orders filled, with whistles on the shelf waiting for you (hint, hint.) There's only two gig bags I still owe people, and that's because they shipped them nearly a month ago but they never arrived here. The company promised me I'll have my replacement order by the start of next week. My fingers are crossed.

That's it for now. It's out to the shop to turn the tuning slides on the next 25 whistles.

Stay "tuned,"

Carey