Hamilton Stamping produces a completely assembled international product endorsed by the NHL

"It all began with an invention - the creation of a revolutionary pealess whistle by professional referee Ron Foxcroft in 1987. Today, this still-unique whistle is the first choice of sports organizations worldwide - including the NFL, NCAA, NBA, CFL, FIBA and FIFA. But today the company that grew from the invention - Fox 40 International - is much more than a whistle company. There are Fox 40 products for the sports and leisure, promotional, marine, personal safety and disaster management markets - all offering that "something extra" you'd expect from a company founded on innovation."

Fox 40 today produce 10's of millions plastic pealess whistles as well as other product lines. These products are developed and produced in tight partnership with a group of select suppliers. Hamilton Stamping is one of these partners.

Fox 40 had a challenge. Their plastic whistle (which was a pealess whistle) had become the standard for most sports except hockey. Fox 40 had invented a patented "stop clock" system for game timing which needed a whistle with a consistent standard tone to control it. The National Hockey League (NHL) also preferred the traditional metal whistle with the pea inside as it better suited their specific needs.

Fox 40 launched a worldwide search for a supplier who could produce a whistle built to the quality and the cost needed to compete with the current market leader in metal whistles. Their search brought them to us when they were made aware of Hamilton Stamping's reputation of tackling challenges no one else would touch.

We developed several design prototypes in order to match the trademarked look of their plastic whistle and provide the required performance.

At Fox 40's request, we further developed a very unique and innovative automated robotic soldering workstation which performed a complex soldering operation on the stamped brass whistles using lead free solder to assemble the whistle in one step. A final plating operation was used to provide a number of different finishes for the whistle.

The quality and cost competitiveness of this whistle has resulted in hundreds of thousands of these metal whistles being produced over the past three years. This whistle is also produced in different styles and is the official whistle of the NHL.

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