My Warpipes Teacher, Louis Noble.
(This was originally written for the San Francisco Pipers Club newsletter)
Some years ago I went to a pipers club meeting, but no one else showed up! I called Pat Cotter to see if he had any word about the meeting; he didn't but invited me over to his lodgings as he had a piper, Pat Buckley, visiting him. Buckley had his practice set with him, which had a Naugahyde bag -- the first I had ever seen or heard of. I had acquired a Crowley E-flat chanter, now I knew how to make an affordable bag. My bag is still the original single layer, but I plan to make a new one of double layer.
I had a woodturner's lathe and made the neck stock from a piece of scrap oak table leg. I made a blowpipe from a piece of rosewood; I had been given a collection of odd scraps of Mexican rosewood in return for looking out for a friend's mail while she traveled in Mexico. The blowpipe stock was made from half a drone stock from a Pakistani Scots small pipe; the other half became the outlet from the bellows.
The bellows cheeks were made from a scrap of pine drawing board someone had once made into a makeshift table top. The original "leather" was a single layer of Naugahyde, tacked to the cheeks. After some years wear, a hole wore through one of the corners, so I replaced this with a double layer (glued back to back with contact cement). The hinge is a piece of leather strap. The inlet is the "Tinkertoy" style, made from a piece of maple couch leg I found in the street.
When I completed electronics tech school in 1983, I took a month's vacation and started making the drones. The stock cup is 2-1/2 inch brass tube salvaged from an art-deco vase purchased for $10 at a "garage sale" store in the Haight. The remainder of the tube became the ferule for the drone stock. The cup bottom is 1/16 inch brass plate soldered on with a hole in the middle to fit a threaded electrical box fitting. The fitting goes inside the bag, through a metal washer, a rubber washer, the bag, and the cup, where it is secured with a electrical fitting nut.
The drone stock is turned from birch left over from the Sacramento capitol restoration (my ex brother in law was a carpenter on that job, and gave me an assortment of hard wood scrap). The stop key is made from a brass rod for a toilet bowl float valve.
The drones are turned from the same batch of rosewood mentioned before. The tuning pin section of the bass drone required two pieces, as I didn't have enough long scraps; it is joined in a ferule to make one long section. The sound box on the end of the drone is made from a brass napkin ring purchased in Chinatown. The curved parts on the standing part are trumpet crooks; the curve for the sound box end is a horn crook; these were purchased at Woodwinds & Brass, a repair shop. The tuning slides are made up from two layers of hobby shop telescoping brass tubing, sweat soldered together, to save the expense of buying 12 foot mill lengths of tubing (in those days I didn't know about Small Parts, inc., which sells short length's of heavy wall tubing) when I needed about a foot or less of three sizes.
The drone reeds were originally all cane, but I always had trouble with the baritone. About the time of the last Tionol, it wouldn't work right, only a screamer. It became a "cork" for several months. About a month or two ago, I thought about the plastic drone reeds I had seen in a Rogge set at the Tionol; I hunted through my reedmaking box and found an old all-metal drone reed I had made as an experiment (not made to fit any particular drone, merely experimental and based on info in a pipe organ book). I unbound and discarded the thick metal tongue, and bound on one cut from a plastic ID card from SF General Hospital. At first it was too flat, so I just kept winding on binding until it was the right pitch. It generally works better than the remaining cane reeds.
The chanter is a single keyed, made by John Pedersen of Amazing Grace Music, San Anselmo, California.