learn to make uilleann pipes

Last weekend in Killington I got to meet Bruce Childress.

It was after one of the concerts and we ended up in one of the conference rooms for a couple of tunes. Bruce was there with a new guitar he had made for himself and I managed to spend a good 20 minutes begging for information on the setup he uses for pipemaking.

Mostly he gave me tips on reamer-making as well as a strong suggestion to prefer gundrills over d-bits. Be that as it may, I think that the d-bits will remain much more in my budget in the near future.

I asked if he was accepting apprentices and he told me that he wasn’t. He said the best thing to do was to keep going to events, talking to makers and leeching as much information as possible.

A great opportunity. Thanks, Bruce!

It’s a little hard to make progress on this item when my lathe is mothballed in somebody’s basement (which it is). I am currently working on setting up my workbench to accommodate my router so that I can try a method of whistle-making traditionally associated with Native American Indian whistles. For this I need to be able to affix my router to the underside of the bench so that I can set up a sturdy fence on top and feed my workpieces along the router instead of trying to run the router manually along the workpiece. My first attempts at freehand routing failed pretty miserably – in one case the router actually tossed the workpiece off the bench.

In May I will be moving my lathe to my parents’ chalet where I hope to take over some of my mother’s workspace. Then I’ll be able to move my stock there as well and start turning again. It’ll be a long drive (3.5 hours) on the weekends but well worth it to have the space to work properly.

In the meantime I have tested out a couple of the pipes I turned last summer with some plastic reeds and they actually sound and can play (incredibly badly tuned) scales. I’ll be trying over the next couple of months to put together a bag and bellows set to replace the ones I am currently using for my Scottish smallpipes; I already have the bag cut and sewed, I just need to add a welt and it should be good to go. The router setup will help with the bellows as well since it will be far easier to route the paddles than to try cutting them from straight stock.

I bought a set of Scottish smallpipes for cheap (from Pakistan) on eBay. They are mouth-blown so I’ll be making a set of bellows to hook up to them. I guess I’ll just replace all the pieces one by one until I have a working set of uilleann pipes. I re-did all the joint wrappings last night so they’re actually air-tight now. My chanter seems to be out of tune (which is pretty much par for the course with this cheap-o “brand” of pipes) but my drones seem to be OK.

So far I have made a bag and bellows that actually work (with hand-crafted valves no less); the pipes themselves are taking quite a bit longer. I have turned the tops to two drones, the bottom to one, and two (unsatisfactory) chanters.

I recently read an article on stitching the gusset to the bellows paddles so I am currently re-working my bellows with the new design.