The Ohio company says it's the only domestic producer of metal whistles.

The Ohio company says it's the only domestic producer of metal whistles.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- Some people watch football games to see quarterbacks connecting on long touchdown passes and linebackers hammering running backs to the ground.
Ray Giesse watches to see the officials blow their whistles. After all, they might be using one of his.
Giesse, 52, owns the privately held American Whistle Corp., which touts itself as the United States' only manufacturer of metal whistles. Its competition comes mainly from overseas, including Japan, Taiwan, China and England.
"My friends and my wife laugh at me because I'm the only one who zooms in on the whistle," Giesse said. "I can't even pass a police officer on the street without looking."
Giesse bought Colsoff Manufacturing Co. 15 years ago, after working as an area sales manager for a trucking company and dabbling in real estate. The owner, James Casias, decided to sell the factory after he and his wife became ill, said their daughter, Jean Savoia.
Turning it around
"We thought it was a unique market, and we thought we had identified why the business had deteriorated," Giesse said.
"The first thing we approached was marketing," Giesse said. "We approached a variety of new markets that hadn't been approached before," such as retail stores. Previously, the company's biggest market was sporting goods distributors, he said.
Casias stayed on as a consultant, and workers videotaped him making whistles to use in training.
"Our first order was for 5,000 whistles," Giesse said. "It took us about a month. Now, we can do that in a shift."
Under Giesse's watch, the company has grown from producing about 70,000 whistles in the first year to about 1 million traditional and custom whistles per year. The company produces traditional metal whistles, which retail for $2 to $4 dollars and will make custom designs for the cost of making a die and a minimum order of 240 whistles. A die costs $360, but lasts for several million whistles, Giesse said.
Giesse renamed the company because he wanted people to identify with the fact that the whistles were made in America.
Giesse is the company's president and chief executive, and his wife, Diane Serraglio, is vice president. There are nine other employees.
Its customers include Wal-Mart, which Giesse says saved the company by agreeing to buy whistles in 1990.
American Whistle also sells the NFL commemorative gold-plated whistles for the officiating crew at the Super Bowl each year, which keeps them purely as a souvenir. Since the league doesn't have an official whistle, referees must use whistles they have purchased themselves, said Mike Pereira, the league's director of officiating.
How they are made
The whistles start as coiled ribbons of brass that are fed into a press that cuts two pieces: a top piece that looks like a square with Mickey Mouse ears attached and a rectangle for the bottom.
The pieces are bent by machine before going into a custom designed soldering machine. A single worker sits at the machine, slides the top and bottom pieces of the whistles together and drops them on a conveyor that feeds several rotating spindles. As the spindles turn, pieces are added to the whistles and they are soldered together before being dumped into a hopper.
A piece of synthetic cork is then pushed by A piece of synthetic cork is then pushed by machine into the hollow of the whistle. The cork is not actually needed to produce sound, Giesse said. Instead, it changes the pitch and modulation of the whistle.american whistle