Steam Whistles

[bob shutt]

Here is my lastest project Steam whistles

 

[Herbiev]

Very nice. Thanks for sharing.

 

[cidrontmg]

Nice whistles! I did some whistles a long time ago, and curiously, some whistles I couldn't work with steam, but compressed air it screamed, and vice versa, some steam whistles hooted excellently, but compressed air, it was just hissing. Some whistles worked both ways, but the sound was almost always a bit different with steam or air. I guess your steam whistles work just as well with compressed air ?

 

[terrywerm]

Nice whistles!

Olli, whistles work and sound differently when using different media. Steam is more dense than air, thus the different behavior and sound, as you have experienced. If you were to try nitrogen, or some other gas, they would behave differently yet. There is a steam whistle group on Yahoo that has tons of information on designing and building whistles, and yes, they should be designed for the medium that they will use in order to blow correctly. There is a whole bunch of science behind it all!

 

[GWRdriver]

I concur with Terry's comments, and the Yahoo whistle group can be More Than You Ever Needed to Know About Whistles! (the science part.) I've made a number of whistles also, and I've found they can be fairly forgiving of design variations as long as a few critical relationships (the aperture and the cut-up - ie, the "gaps") are kept within limits. There can be small design differences between whistles for steam and those for air (or nitrogen), but the key is to tune the whistle on the gas that will be used to blow it. As Terry says, a whistle tuned to air may not sound good, or at all, on steam.

Nice whistles Bob, whose valves do you use?

My next whistles (probably) are going to be a pair of signal whistles (British "hooters") for my current loco project. (These pictured are from a full size GWR loco.)