Livingston Posted June 7, 2015 Posted June 7, 2015 I'm very interested to get sum feed back on those who've made whistling spollettes!!!
nater Posted June 7, 2015 Posted June 7, 2015 What do you want to know? They are not very loud in a 1/4" or 5/16" spolette tube. If I made one again, I would use a 1/2" motor tube pressed with enough whistle for the timing. I kinda like the raspy sound from Potassium Benzoate whistle with red iron oxide.
Livingston Posted June 7, 2015 Author Posted June 7, 2015 Where would aquire tooling? That's my fav whistle mix that's all I really use. 1/2 for what size shells???
nater Posted June 7, 2015 Posted June 7, 2015 (edited) I like to make various 1/2" sized inserts. The rammer just needs to be a flat dowel or aluminum rod. This and a suitable pressing base are all you need. I use square of aluminum or steel and a small arbor press. If you prefer a recess, you can make simple base from a piece of 1/2" dowel and a block of wood. Just drill a hole large enough for a friction fit for the dowel in the block. Don't drill all the way through. Glue the section of dowel in the block, tap it with a mallet if it needs some persuasion. 1/2" sticking out would be a minimum. The length is not critical, but does affect the tone of the whistle to some degree. I would use 1/2" for a 3" shell or larger. Yes it is bigger than a standard spolette. Remember you want the volume for the effect. Edited June 7, 2015 by nater
Livingston Posted June 7, 2015 Author Posted June 7, 2015 So you're saying a half inch recessed with a 1/2" tube would be sufficient for a loud sound.? 1
Wiley Posted June 8, 2015 Posted June 8, 2015 I didn't see anything in the build process shown in the above video that I, or any other sane pyro would consider safe. Whistle is nasty stuff and needs to be treated with the same respect as flash. Hand ramming it is certainly a really bad idea, but I honestly can't believe that it didn't ignite from being ground in a mortar and pestle.
Strannik Posted June 8, 2015 Posted June 8, 2015 Experienced chemists are thus able to grind potassium chlorate with sulfur. But small amounts. Formulations with less sensitive potassium perchlorate. Still, you can not play with them.
GMetcalf Posted June 8, 2015 Posted June 8, 2015 (edited) I did honestly just watch a person with no PPE grind Whistle Mix and then ram it into what appeared to be a PVC tube didn't I? I agree with Wiley - absolute lunacy.  Experienced chemists are thus able to grind potassium chlorate with sulfur. But small amounts. Formulations with less sensitive potassium perchlorate. Still, you can not play with them. I don't think experience has anything to do with it. If your chemicals are thoroughly pure then yes, grinding together Potassium Chlorate and Sulphur might not result in disaster very often. However, no one's chemicals are pure enough, all Sulphur contains some acidic species and doing so, no matter how many times you may have done so, is asking for a consultation with a plastic surgeon. Potassium Chlorate is also intrinsically mechanically unstable and also, as far as I'm aware, unstable under UV. Friction can and does decompose the Chlorate ion into Chloride and Oxygen, UV I believe decomposes it into a mixture of Chlorine, Chlorine Dioxide and Oxygen (although I don't quite remember where I read this so please do correct me if I'm wrong). This second one means if you happen to be mixing your Sulphur and Chlorate containing mixture in the sunny outdoors it's even more likely to send you on the aforementioned trip to the plastic surgeon. It doesn't matter if an 'experienced' chemist or some guy on YouTube managed to grind a sensitive mixture without incident. Don't ask for trouble, treat mixtures like Whistle with respect and don't mix things which are incompatible like Chlorates and Sulphur (even though it did used to be common practice), it isn't necessary and isn't clever! Safety rant over... EDIT:In answer to the spolette question; 10mm internal diameter whistles work well as inserts and I assume using such a tube as a spolette would work perfectly ok. My usual spolette diameter using Black Powder is 6mm internal, so a hop up to 10mm isn't making the tube too big. For those working in old money; 6mm in approximately 1/4 inch and 10mm is somewhere around 7/16 inch. I haven't tried whistles smaller than 10mm diameter so I wouldn't know how audible they are in the air! Edited June 8, 2015 by GMetcalf 1
FlaMtnBkr Posted June 8, 2015 Posted June 8, 2015 A very well known rocket maker milled whistle together for years before finally stopping. So it doesn't surprise me someone was able to mix it in a mortar and pestle and then ram into a tube while living to tell about it. But whistle is very powerful and is sensitive. So while you may get away with treating it rough many times, you may also have a deadly explosion the first time trying it. You never know when Murphy is going to show up and ruin your day and probably your year, if not the rest of your life.  Whistle is very powerful and there have been numerous accidents with it, so anyone that cares about themselves and their family and loved ones should take every step possible to work safely and wear protection. You may get away with something a 100 or a 1000 times but if the possibility is there it's not worth taking the risk and tempting faith. It's also usually when you get comfortable with something and don't wear your safety gear that you have an accident. All that said, I have made small whistles mainly for inserts, with just hand or body pressure. Don't think I would do that with a spolette where timing is an issue. Unless you don't care about tight timing and you do enough experimenting to know that your shell will go off while still high in the sky.
Mumbles Posted June 9, 2015 Posted June 9, 2015 First, Benrenyi4, that is extremely dangerous. Basically everything in that video is explicitly what not to do. Please don't grind together finished compositions in a mortar and pestle, especially something as sensitive as whistle. The chemicals should be ground separately, and mixed via the diaper method or screening. It is also extremely ill advised to ram whistle. It should only be pressed. If you keep up those VERY unsafe practices, you're going to have an accident. It's not a maybe or and if, but a when. I've made whistling spolettes a couple times. I think there was a PGI article a few years ago by Jim Biersach on them. It may also be in the Anthology if you have that. There really isn't anything special about how they are made. Just a column of whistle. There are a couple of tips though. Firstly, I've always been recommended to press small increments of BP on both sides of the whistle column. This is supposed to help with giving and taking fire. Secondly. I've always used them backwards. The flush pressed end being in the interior of the shell, and the hollow section pointing outwards to help with the whistling effect. This works in the same way as the recess that Nater described, but no special tooling. I don't know how critical either of those things are, but they worked for me, and are how I was shown to make them. 1
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