Literally boring with a bar made for the purpose. It takes a while to widen the chamber from 1/2″ to 1,1/2″ but the bar leaves a nice smooth surface. 

It helps sometimes to make things in batches, especially the bellows. For the pipes themselves I’ve discovered that it’s too tedious to make multiple sets at a time but it’s enjoyable to make the bags and bellows that way. Here’s a newly finished mainstock with one of four bellows finished last week. 

Another pic

I saw some excellent buskers on the street of Asheville today. It was perfect weather and we all know the warm days are falling off quickly. There were lots of tourists walking around and I thought it would be a good idea to play the latest set of smallpipes in public for a while before sending them off on Monday. This set is made of Osage orange with antler mounts in the key of D and they made me ten bucks on Lexington street today just before Mela Indian restaurant opened. I got to explain to a lot of people what the Scottish smallpipes were and play a lot of dance tunes as well as some of the light music I’m competing with next year. The pipes worked like a charm and I’ll take them to the Irish session tomorrow night at Jack of the Wood pub before sending them off on Monday, finally. I asked my first tipper to take my picture. 

I took this picture from the air on the way back from Austin this weekend. Going out of town to play the pipes is a big change of pace from making them and it’s hard to get back into the groove of woodturning all day. My current set to be finished is a set of Osage orange/antler pipes and the drones are still not done. I did some starting on the next set, a blackwood/antler set but I’ve got to finish these osage pipes before I really get going on them. Today I did a lot of practicing for the Winter Storm in January. I’ve got to learn four piobaireachds from the silver medal list and I’ve just about got them. This coming up weekend is the Celtic Classic.

I’ve had the privilege to come to the Texas Capitol for the last three days to play flute and smallpipes on the Scottish singing legend, Ed Miller’s new CD “Lyrics of Gold”. This picture is the view from the taco bar where I’ve eaten almost every meal and you can see the capitol building in the distance. 

It turns out that the producer of Ed’s project, Rich Brotherton, will be playing with the Robert Earl Kean Band at LEAF this October in Asheville. I’ll be there singing along to every song as loud as I can.

:

Well after an hour with 8 pounds of plaster perched on top the bag has lost a little bit of air but it’s just at the point where one would think about pumping the bellows. I think it’s good. 

Here are some mount samples clockwise from the top: Axis antler, Osage orange, Tx ebony, olive, cocobolo, boxelder burl.

I have to thank Mr M. for giving me a nudge to get more out of the camera. When I get some time I’ll build a special box with lights to improve the quality of pictures but this is just poking around the camera menu to get better closeups. 

The antler, the osage orange, and the Tx ebony are all from Texas. I don’t know where  exactly the others are from besides the continent. Cocobolo from S. America, Olive from Africa, and Boxelder Burl from N. America.

I’m making a set of pipes from the Osage this week and the bag and bellows are almost done along with the last big batch of chanter reeds so it’s just the turning that remains.

Well the pipes are all packed up and I just wanted to upload this video of the D chanter before going to the post office. This was a fun project to make a set with Mammoth ivory but it was expensive and time consuming as I worried over such a precious material. I played them all day long yesterday, the day before, and this morning so I’ve got a lot of hours on them.Blackwood Mammoth Ivory D chanter  

I played them for a few hours last night and got the drones and the A chanter pretty well set. Some video to follow. 

This is the first time I’ve worked with any kind of ivory, in this case mammoth ivory from Siberia, and I love the way the project has turned out. Making one-off sets of pipes is a fun way to do it and after spending all week last week and most of the weekend I’m getting into the assembly and playing stage. Today it’s off to the store for some cotton thread to be beeswaxed and used for the joints of this set, then play them all week to be sent off on Friday. I’ll upload some closeups later in the week when I get the silver put on.