When ‘the only way’ isn’t ‘the best way,’ or even a good one

One of the frustrating things about working with an atypical production process is that it’s easy to focus on, frankly, how awesome it is to create something which would usually take tools inaccessible to most people. However, just because something is possible doesn’t mean that it’s sustainable in perpetuity. As any home creator knows, there’s a substantial difference between solving a problem once, and solving it for the foreseeable future.

Fixturing things for the desktop CNC mill is a good example - it’s often possible to rig things up to get a piece or two out, but long-term consistency (and effort to payoff ratio!) requires planning ahead. For example, to standardize hole layout for the classic and session models, I 3D printed a fixture for the mill, and when we verified it worked well, we cast the same model in bronze for rigidity and longevity. However, a more traditional shop would already have workholding solutions applicable to a wide variety of tasks. While it’s amazing we can do it, it’s also a pain to have to invent a new fixture for tasks like engraving, and eats up time for actually producing the product.

Something that is especially painful after spending so much time designing, testing, revising, and retesting solutions like this is the knowledge that something like a lathe would have solved the weeks-long problem in five seconds. Making our own tubing has been a goal for a while, and the current method is objectively bad. Lost wax casting thin-walled, high aspect ratio parts is essentially a primer on what is not a good candidate for lost-wax casting.

However, the point of this post isn’t to complain - rather, to highlight that challenges like these can provide both important perspective on long-term plans and avoiding burnout, as well as massively expanding our creativity to tackle problems in the future. In service of all these things ordinary machine tools would have solved instantly, we’ve learned new design strategies that will be invaluable in the future, we’ve developed better eyes for potential issues in the design phase, and hell - we may have invented a new bronze alloy so good it’s patentable.

So, while it’s still taking us some time to build up stock, partner with local music stores etc, the extra challenges haven’t been pointless, and I’m still getting out individual orders on the regular. Hopefully this latest round of tube fabrication experiments will bear fruit, and we can finally get some of the all-bronze whistles out. They look fabulous and sound even better!