This chanter was made to play medieval music with an open fingering like a gaita. The bell is supposed to look like some of the drawings of chanters around the 14th century.

The thing I’m doing this week just happened last night at the Mucky Duck. My band Clandestine released a CD called “ReD” and I played a new A chanter out of Kingwood. It performed brilliantly and I’ve got another gig on Saturday in Corpus Christi, Tx, where I might get somebody to hold the camera to take a video. I’m putting some pewter on this thing next week and sending it to a piping history buff in Va.

I’ve been working all week on the pipes going to Australia and the customer ordered some extra drone reeds and I made these:I’m going to start offering these things. Yes they sound different but they’re not as scary as cane as far as user servicing goes. The tongues are styrene from the hobby store like a lot of the composite drone reeds out there.I worked a bit on a Great pipe chanter for a friend in Virginia that I’m hoping to play with Clandestine this weekend. I’ll also be visiting the Highland pipe reed store to get some new reeds for these chanters in A.

So I’ve been making this set of pipes for a customer living in Australia and I’ve had this tune in my head all day long. Great song but you probably get sick of it if you actually live there I’m guessing. This is just the preliminary playing on the set and I’ve got both chanters about where I want them but I’ve got to keep working on the drone reeds. I went to Canada once by air and had their national anthem, just the first two words, going through my head for the whole three hour flight. I should obviously not fly to Australia without tranquilizers for fear of being injured by the repetition of this tune in my head for 12? 18 hours? Anyway here’s basically what the pipes sound like. I’m taking them to California this weekend.Mopane Olive set playing “South Australia”

I know the problem with blogs is that people end up thinking every little minute detail of their lives is interesting but darn it my vacuum cleaner is pretty interesting. I got the new one today and I’m going to hopefully get started on a Highland chanter for a friend in Virginia. Here’s the old and new vacuums and a good lesson in being careful what you breathe:

If anyone from the Electrolux company is reading this…I did not run my vacuum for hours while picking up all kinds of dust from wood to metal to abrasive grinding materials like it explicitly warns against in the manual. I did not do this many days per week for four years. I originally bought this vacuum cleaner because it was super quiet, more powerful than a shop vac, and small enough that I could take it on the road in the same suitcase as the lathe. What a great vacuum cleaner it was too and I’ve often wondered “how long is this thing going to last with all the abuse I’ve heaped on it?” About six months ago the power switch was shorting and I had to kind of kick it to get it to go again but worked great. A couple of days ago it started making a burning smell and a few more kicks got the loud motor noise to abate for a while but eventually the smell became too dangerous-smelling and I started to worry I was really poisoning the air around me, a thought made more real by the hung over feeling I had all day today. I was so happy to be closing in on the turning for that Mopane/Olive set of pipes that I didn’t want to wait another two days for the replacement vacuum to arrive (tomorrow) and I just continued. I got the pipes finished but felt awful all day and took most of the day off, a first in a long time.If anyone is looking for a really quiet, powerful, easy to use vacuum cleaner the Electrolux Harmony served me very well and who knows how long it would have lasted under “normal” use.Tomorrow I’ll bury this one in the back yard since the damn home owners association forbids outdoor appliance cremations. Communists! ….or recycle it or something.

Most of the day was spent finishing the woodturning on this set of Mopane pipes with Olive mounts. I really love the way they look and haven’t glued on the silver or tied in the bag yet but I wanted to take a quick picture. I love the way this looks and I picked out the most feature-full piece of Olive I had for the set. This has been a good week for turning but a bad week for supplies and equipment. The excellent vacuum cleaner I use for dust collection started making bad noises and a burning smell yesterday as I was gluing on the mounts and today it slowly went kaput, losing suction, making horrible noises and emitting a dangerous smell. I ordered another one exactly like it since this one has given me four years of great service and I’ve abused the hell out of it. We’ll have a Viking funeral for this poor Electrolux Harmony that was worked to death. I just need to build a little boat for it. Tomorrow is leather day and hopefully I’ll be playing this Mopane set in the afternoon.

I probably shouldn’t put this kind of stuff in the blog but the cane I’ve been waiting for finally arrived today. Now one pile of cane is like the last shipment I ordered a few years ago and it’s fine. One pile is just barely usable because it’s right on the edge of being too thick. One pile is totally unusable in any kind of bagpipe I’ve ever known. Want to guess which pile is which?$300 on this stuff and a month of waiting. If I’m very very lucky the place in France will take it back and send me the diameter I thought I was ordering which was 4mm-7mm. The big pile of cane there is 6.5mm-7.5mm which technically might be okay for them to call 4-7 but it totally screws me. The last batch was a pretty even distribution of 4-7 mm.Looks like I’m going to be making a lot of composite reeds this year or cutting my own cane back in Texas.

I’ve been working on this set for a few days and the connectors, mainstock, and chanters are done. I was hoping to finish the chanters in time to make the Irish session tonight at Jack of the Wood but it took me a bit longer than I expected and I caught the local fiddler and banjo player just walking out the door. So I went back home and played a bit in the house and took this badly lit picture. I love the way the Olive looks with the Mopane and it smells terrific, like, olive oil, kind of. Well I’m on to drones tomorrow and I’ll probably take this set out to San Diego to play the session out there as well as try it out busking here in Asheville.

Here’s my first attempt at cane body/plastic tongue drone reeds. cane body styrene tongue drone reed It is kind of sad how well these things work. I’ve never seen cane used for the body of the reed but styrene is used in a lot of composite reeds nowadays. A friend of mine uses brass for the body and I’ve seen copper body/cane tongue in another maker’s pipes. I believe this setup will be steadier in variable humidity conditions including the very dry air of the New England winter indoors. Not exactly the old way but it passes the function test.