Franken-French-Flemish Bagpipes

This is the story of a bagpipe i bought many many moons ago. Enough moons ago that i no longer have any clue who made it. I seem to remember it might have come from Australia, and it's made of some unspecified mystery rosewood, with some unspecified (and nasty) mystery black plastic trim.

This is the original set of parts for the cornemuse du centre. A chanter in G ("16 pouces") with one small drone running alongside in a common stock. One bass drone goes back over the shoulder, and a standard blowpipe.

The first thing to be replaced was the blowpipe, since i exclusively play with a bellows. I removed the blowpipe and its stock, and tied a plug into the hole. I made a new blowpipe - from plumbing parts - which dates this to probably 1999 or so, before i ever had a lathe. Pretty soon i also replaced the chanter, with a lovely ebony one from Jean-Sylvain Maitre. It didn't fit into the chanter stock, but it did fit the newly free blowpipe stock, so i wound up tying the blowpipe stock into the bag neck, and playing with just the one bass drone, pointed forward. This is how i've played it for the last 25+ years.

More recently i've gotten a D ("20 pouces") chanter from Bernard Jacquemin, and thought it would be cool to have a D drone on this set, and to be able to swap chanters. So the first thing is to make a new chanter stock for the bag neck, and one "split stock" reed cap for each chanter. These are made of plum wood with African blackwood trim. The plum is not a terrible colour match for the original rosewood or for the service wood of the D chanter, and the blackwood is so much nicer than whatever ungluable black plastic is on the rest of the pipes.

It's long past time to get rid of the plumbing blowpipe. Since i'm super lazy i decided to reuse the original blowpipe stock (now that it's not the chanter stock any longer) and blowpipe. I shortened the stock, drilled out the blowpipe, and reshaped it to mate with my bellows. Ordinarily i would not condone modifying someone else's work, but (a) i can't figure out who made it anyway, and (b) this set was frankly really poorly made and i don't feel bad.

Next is to reconfigure the drones. I'll be reusing the original bass G drone, and adding a new D drone. They will be in a Flemish bagpipe configuration, in a double stock pointing forward. My take on this style of stock is to glue up a stack of two hexagonal segments with an air channel connecting them internally. This is my second time making one of these.

Here is the "before" picture of the new drone...

...Halfway done...

...And all the way done. This project is the first time i'm doing this style of decoration, ie. a wood ring, glued on prior to turning. Usually with imitation ivory i tend to profile and polish the mounts first, and add them once the wooden parts are otherwise complete and already polished up. With this current style it's important to get really accurately fitting glue joints to start with, so no gaps appear once they're turned down. I'm very happy with this result. I've also added a drone stopper plug: when the bore is small enough to allow it, i just use an unslotted guitar bridge pin. I've added one to the original bass drone as well.

Here is the final form of this bagpipe with the G and D chanters, and two drones at the ready for either one. Four different bagpipe makers are represented here, from three countries on three continents.