Slide of the Month - Whistle Slide

August 2018

Time to make: 1 hours

Boys Life "Slide of the Month"

August 1979,  page 52

Original design: Tom Dwyer









A fun functional little slide with high note and a lower note that kind of reminds me of an English Bobby's whistle. I not sure how a whistle really stops crime but I'm sure if that didn't work there is always "Stop or I'll say Stop again"

I started with a scrap piece of maple that just happened to be the size I needed. I marked the centers on both sides and drilled a 1/4 in hole  2 inches deep on one side and 2 1/2 inches on the other side. (The difference in the depth give the whistle the different tones.) Next I cut the 90 degree with a coping saw the cut the angle cut down to the 90 cut. To make the whistle work I cut a 1/4 inch dowel an inch long and flattened just the top down the length of the dowel. A lot of how much to take off is trial and error so I would put the dowel into the mouth piece, blow into it and if it didn't work take off a little more. When I got a sound I glued it in place and repeated the process on the other side. Now when gluing, the plug wasn't inserted deeper that the mouth piece so about a half inch will stick out of the whistle. When everything was dry, I cut off the excess plug and then began to shape the whistle. A bit of sanding to finish the shaping and round the rough edges before finishing with some shellac. A word of warning here, there is a good chance that any hard finish may block the little hole in the mouth piece as it dries. So if I had to do it again, I might use some foil to block the hole (hindsight).  To finish it off, I drilled some holes, in the half inch section with no other holes, and super glued a coat hanger loop into them