Whistle Cleaning
 

Any tips on how to clean your whistles?? I am gearing up for AYBT and figured that I had better clean them. Thanks!!

I clean all my Fox 40s in vinegar. Does wonders. You'll be surprised what all comes out. Just soak them for an hour or so.

I usually dip them in mouth wash and I have put Purell on them as well if they are really grimy and let it sit in my bag before I use it.

Peace

Thanks guys!! I was also wondering is it worth it to join the NASO if you already have insurance? I get Referee magazine and they keep sending me stuff in it sayin I can only join for $23, but most of the Benefits are about insurance. WHat do you think?

The insurance is extra. It is not required. I have been a NASO member for years. I like the fact that I can get many of their products at a discount and I get the magazine for free. If that is not worth it to you, then do not get it.

Peace

I put my whistles in boiling water. Fast and easy.

i would join. the people at NASO are great and you get discounts. You also get legal advice if you need it if something happens.

Great tip that a veteran passed on to me was to soak your whistles in a solution of baking soda in water. It works really well to get all the 'gunk' out of your whistle.

I usually do the baking soda treatment, then soak my whistles in mouthwash for a nice mint (or sometimes cinammon) flavor.

The absolute best way to clean your whistles to to drop them into a glass of Coke and leave them overnight. Be sure to use Coke Classic and not that snussy Diet Coke stuff. In the morning, everything that was in and on your whistle will have dissolved out and your whistles will be absolutely clean and sterile. As an added bonus, you can also drink the Coke for breakfast. It now has an added flavor that is quite tasty, and it is nutritious also.

It's true, it's true.....

<b><u>WARNING:</u></b> Make sure that you detach your lanyards before placing your whistles in the Coke. If not, the lanyards will also dissolve, and thus will ruin the taste of the Coke the next morning.

Negative! Do not do this! The plastic will melt or start to deform if you leave it in there too long. Plus, a big no-no, the shine on the whistle will fade because of the hot water. The black will turn to an off dull black. Vinegar sounds the best to me because we use this to clean other things like coffee makers, etc. Leave it in over night, soak it in mouthwash before storing in your bag.

Actually, might not be a bad idea to do this treatment to your spare whistle in case one of your partners forgets theirs. They will appreciate the mouth-wash treatment.

I soak mine in weasel extract. It's available at DieblerMart. :)

Or you can just chew and fidget through two or three whistles a season. Saves a lot of cleaning!!

If you allow them to melt you don't need to be messing with boiling water in the first place. Also, they will fade if you keep them in there too long...otherwise, it won't hurt the whistle.

That won't happen if you use cold boiling water. Try it.

"Clean whistle??!! I don't need no stinking clean whistle!!"

With apologies to Mel Brooks.

MTD, Sr.

OS agreed with me. I'm turning in my striped shirt and squeaky clean whistle tomorrow.:p I'm keeping the pants though, quite stylish if you ask me.

This should keep OS busy for a few days. Good work, JR!

It's certainly not impossible to have cold boiling water. In fact, water that is boiling can freeze pretty quickly (during the boiling action) if the proper conditions are present. (It does take some "special" -- though not outlandish -- equipment).

If I remember my physics correctly, you can boil cold water by introducing a vacuum.

No, I'm not going to make the obvious "Old School" joke here either.:D

Okay, I'll bite, I'm probably going to regret this but, what the hey. How do you get cold water to boil?

Reminds me of the old Three Stooges short in which they were trying to mix up a batch of "spotted paint". :)

Run your whistles thru the dishwasher...just put them in the silverware compartment and take them out before the dry cycle...works great.

now I'm not a chemist, but really, anything wich has a pH value not equal to 7 will do the trick. That's why all the above will work ( they are both acids so they will react and dissolve(? not sure on my english here) the dirt). How ever, don't use anything to strong like things you find in a lab, they might make your whistle go away, or have nasty reactions (e.g. if you put metal into HNO3 you will end up with highly toxic gas, but HNO3 is at least not for sale to the public in sweden, so I suppose you would know not to use it if you acctually had some).
Now my point is, I wouldn't go with boiling water, but use some vingear, coke, or other standard substances (iow, things you can eat) wich have a pH not equal to 7 and you will end up with a nice and clean whistle.

I think you would have to lower the pressure quite much, but it's possible. If you try at home you will see that the temperature of boiling changes from day to day (look at the weather and see if you can find clues to when and how it changes). I have only done this a few times, but I found out that you can easily have a three degree lowering in the boiling point, just becuse of the conditions of that day.
But now, this is an official forum, and I think I need more officiating and less school work :p

I just put my whistles in mouthwash overnight and they're minty fresh for a week.

Put a beaker of cold water in a Bell Jar. Evacuate the air to create a vacuum. <i>Voila!</i>..boiling water.

Rudimentary physics experiment.....

Rocky Mountain Cooking
 

If I can correctly recall the gas laws that I learned in my high school and college chemistry classes correctly, cooking instructions for some foods vary depending on the elevation, and thus the air pressure, of the region. Water boils at a lower temperature at higher elevations and some foods require more cooking time, compared to if they were cooked at a lower elevation.

And you recommend this to clean a whistle. Perhaps this is one of the dumbest things ever written on this forum. Stick the whistle in a jar of cold water and evacuate the air! I'm sure that's written in a rulebook somewhere. Why not just stick the whistle under some cold running water, results might even be better. In fact, if you turn on the hot water instead of dinking around with the cold water, results might even be better than that. Just like most of the stuff that happens in a basketball game, I didn't need a damn rulebook to figure it out. You either get it or you don't. Those that don't get it, uses the cold water. That's rudimentary physics!

__________________
Long live David Stern.....

No, he didn't.

Yes, and as the water is "boiling" it is also losing heat. The temperature will drop. When it reaches (about) 32*F or 0*C (whichever comes first ;) ) it will freeze.

Yup, how to boil water to make ice cubes.:)

That's just about the response that I expected.....:D

I thought we where talking about cleaning whistles.

We were. But, as often happens, the thread took a little detour.

No one suggested that cold water be used to clean a whistle. (But, it would be an interesting study -- comparing the efficacy of "cold boiling water" to "hot boiling water" in cleaning (not disinfecting) whistles)

I don't know the answer. I know that the principle is that you lower the pressure to lower the boiling point, and that the level of molecular activity is altered also. I don't have a clue whether any of that is relevant, or if some of the other physical attributes associated with hot boiling water are altered also.

http://www.vuw.ac.nz/scps-demos/demo...r/ColdBoil.htm

Maybe I'll play with Google later to see if I can get some info, in the name of science.:)

This is kinda interesting too...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQEVcCv_xkQ

I knew I would regret this. I hate I asked.

well you've got your answer :p
*whistles* always look on the bright side of life;):)

I think it's well worth the time to spend a few hundred bucks to clean a $6 whistle (including tax).

However, you forgot to take into account the fact that the freezing point will also shift slightly with pressure.

This is too easy.
Stovetop directions
1. Put cold water in a pot may use a skillet if you so desire, but you won't be able to use nearly as much water.)

2. Place said pot (or skillet) of water on a stove burner.

3. Turn said burner to high setting.

Microwave directions
1. Put cold water in a microwave-safe container.

2. Place said container in microwave and cook on high for 10 minutes.

cooking times will vary based on altitude

Snaq,

You forgot the obviously easy answer of getting on a rocket and going into outerspace, where due to the low pressure, the water will boil.

That's not nearly easy enough for a basketball official. :)

Actually, I've found most foods have cooked more quickly since moving from Johnston, Iowa (elevation 957 feet) to Grand Junction, CO (elevation 4586 feet).

But it might be easy enough for (name deleted).

Thus the "(about)" in my post. It will also vary based on the specific composition / mineral content of the water.

So, if hydrogen is flammable, and oxygen is flammable, why does the combination of two parts hydrogen to one part water put out fires? ;)

Which also brings up the fact that because both hydrogen and oxygen by themselves are also <b>inflammable</b>, why do we have to have two almost similar words to describe the exact same physical phenomena?

Maybe we should have a poll to determine what one should be used......:)

"Flammable and inflammable mean the same thing? What a country!" - Dr. Nick

Not only that........

I really didn't want to destroy all of your youthful illusions in one morning, but Dr. Nick was also the one who performed Curt Schilling's ankle surgery.

It's true, it's true.......

It's like flammable and inflammable. They mean the same thing. Boy, I found that out the hard way. -- Woody, from Cheers

Actually Mark (& I think you know this, if not you do now) there is a thing called 'triple point' where at the right pressure and temperature a substance will practically exist as a solid, a liquid and a gas.

enjoy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point

As a chemist by training, y'all are making my head hurt.

This should help:

Do you have mole problems? If so, call Avogadro at 602-1023

(sorry, couldn't resist :) )

That would actually be backward of what it should be. In Johnston, Iowa, water will boil at 210.3 F while at GJ, CO it will boil at 203.7 F. You cannot get H2O in the liquid form at a temperature higher than that, so that is the hottest temperature you can cook in water. Therefore, cooking in boiling water in CO would take longer than in IA. The altitude would not affect cooking time in the oven.
What a geek engineer I am.:D

Yes you can. Lookup "superheated water".

or pressure cooker

Or microwaving liquids......

By the way, Oxygen is NOT flammable.. pardon me while I puke on my shoes

If time was a constant, then getting to the boiling point would be faster in GJ. Therefore making the cooking time shorter would it not?

My bad to assume he was cooking at atmospheric pressure; although, I'll bet that was his case.

Irrelevant. Superheated water occurs at atmospheric pressure.

Isn't that term redundant? :confused:

An engineer who's never heard of a pressure cooker? :D

And this is how I've demonstrated the futility and inaccuracy of anecdotal evidence.

However, I have to ask. Why do the instructions for various items state that cooking times are shorter at higher altitudes?

Don't you hate it when the moderators edit your posts?

Perhaps we should also consider the different carbon footprints that each of these methods will incure on our environment. ;)

Hydrogen peroxide and mouth wash do the trick for me.

Seems more like you're the seller of this than just a user (your username is whistleprod and the device is cleanwhistleproducts.com. That is all fine if you're open about it but making it sound like you're a customer is a bit shady.

I also just looked at that. It seems like a waste of money and it really isn't cleaning them. It may be sanitizing them, however. It is blasting them with UV light. That will kill the germs that the light reaches but I'd be skeptical about whether the UV light can reach all the insides of the whistle where it is likely damp the longest and where the bacteria is most likely to grow.

Instead, I pour 2-3 ounces of Listerine in a small cup and drop the whistles into it for a couple hours. That definitely reaches the entire whistle, will kill anything that is there, and will dissolve or soften most of the residue that may have formed so that it can be rinsed away under the faucet. Cost... probably pennies per year.

There is a little irony in this post. :D

Peace

I'm a Listerine Guy myself
 

I just look at the ROI. For the number of whistles I buy over the course of a few yrs, and how long each one lasts (mostly the rubber mouthpiece cracking), how long would it take for this product (for $39.99 plus S&H) to stretch the life of each whistle to where their life and cleanliness would be so much better/longer to make it worth my while?

Guess I'll pass. For me, a solution for a non-problem.

If only I knew then what I know now. :)

At least you weren't sent to the penalty box.

Nothing like resurrecting an almost 6 year old thread! :D

Moderation here sucks.

Inconsistent and arbitarory

And the spelling here sucks.

Don't forget capricious.

If you have a real, substantial complaint — feel free to email me the details at [email protected]

If you just want to make noise, please don't clutter up the board with gripes about the moderators.

Tim has a fair gripe. Adam should have known SIX YEARS AGO that he would eventually become a moderator and not made such a comment to Bob.

:)

CLEAN WHISTLES?? I DON'T NEED NO STINKN' CLEAN WHISTLES!! :p

MTD, Sr.


P.S. I checked the website: $39.95 plus S/H. I could have bought one large size bottle of Listerine when I first started officiating for far less than that had still have half the bottle left. :p

no doubt that i'll try that...

ô!ô
 

Moderation and owners are now just stupid here.

The board has lost freedom.

oops, I will now be suspended for speaking the truth.

Tee

Don't forget erratic.

Peace

If that's your opinion, why to you keep coming back and posting? And what "freedom" are you talking about? This website is privately owned intellectual propoerty. There's no first amendment rights here. If you're suspended, it won't be for speaking the truth...it'll be for acting like a dope.

Freedom to do what? People who host websites can't have rules?
:confused:

In before the lock. Oh, wait.