Osage Orange smallpipes
Osage Orange is just a wonderful wood for smallpipes. I’ve had the wood turning done on this set for over a month but I’m just today putting reeds in it and the two chanters sound great! I know it’s a softer wood than Blackwood or Cocobolo but it has a very bright clear tone. This is the fourth set I’ve made out of Osage Orange and it sounds just like the others.Going on the road performing on the weekends can really put a damper on production. Every time I go out, just like this past month, I take the lathe and all my tools and wind up getting absolutely nothing done. This time all I had to do was put reeds in two bagpipes and I didn’t even have time to do that. The chanter reeds were even made already!I was running low on drone cane having bought a kilo of it a few years ago. A kilo of drone cane for smallpipes is quite a lot of little pieces. I used to grow my own but it was such a pain cutting down a 15 foot plant to get a tiny handful of the right size that I started ordering it from a farm in France. By the time they got back to me on the order I was starting to run so low that I got scared and decided to order two kilos, probably a five year supply and cost me $400. Damn weak dollar. That’s always the way. Pretty soon it’ll be time to order silver again. sigh. The last time I ordered that the market was at about $7 an ounce. I don’t even want to look now. I could save myself a lot of trouble by just making synthetic reeds but I just can’t get away from the idea of having an all natural instrument. I moved away from cane on my Highland bagpipes just like the rest of the competitive pipers out there but last year I went back to a sheepskin bag and now I’m going to go back to cane reeds as soon as I can. ramble, ramble…