Last week at the Santa Fe Slow Session I let slip that I play the Irish (Uilleann) bagpipes. Jack, the leader, exhorted me to bring them. So I spent all week getting them playable again.

The way I’m doing this is to replace my current pipes piece by piece with parts I’ve modelled in OpenSCAD and 3d printed. So far, I have made these parts:

Chanter

This chanter sounds great! And it’s not just me saying this, I’ve gotten praise from other respected players whose names I promised not to drop. One day maybe I can convince someone to go on the record.

I modelled it off the O’Flynn Rowsome chanter measurements provided by Na Píobairí Uilleann. The low E goes a little sharp if you overblow it, but otherwise this thing sounds amazing, fixing a couple issues I had with my penny chanter.

Don’t get me wrong: the penny chanter is amazing, really bringing down the price of these things by reusing commonly-available parts that didn’t exist 200 years ago. I consider my chanter the next step down the trail David Daye blazed, bringing the cost down further and improving precision and playabality by using a 3D printer.

I’m still working on the design for this. At some point I might completely change the aesthetic, to stop duplicating what a craftsman could make on a lathe.

Chanter Cap

It’s a chanter cap. Later, I’ll work on a mechanism to block the airflow so you can tune your drones and regulators.

You can change the angle between the tubes to whatever you want. I set mine to 45°: David Daye’s cap is more like 70° (closer to perpendicular).

Cost of plastic: 43¢

Stocks

I spent a day researching bagpipe stocks: they’re not very well documented. I spent a good day trying all kinds of different stocks, and I identified three main types of stock:

Scottish stocks

Scottish stocks are tapered, with a round bottom. I thought this must be to make it easier to get them in, but I don’t understand exactly why that would help. After modelling and printing a couple, I gave up on this design.

Boderiou stocks

Boderiou’s Uilleann pipe stocks have a big fat chanter stock that takes most of the diameter of the bag opening (the part you don’t cut). They have three ridges in them for tying it up, and a “head” that sticks out which resembles nothing so much as a penis.

I made one of these and the sheer girth of the thing in the bag actually made it more challenging to seal things off. So I went back to…

Daye stocks

Once again, David’s simple design works best. You don’t need anything fancy: you just need a tube. Having a bit of a cutaway can help.

I put 3M poster putty all the way around the cutaway. On the chanter stock, I put a big ball of putty at the bottom of the stock, and wrapped the neck around the thing. I got a nice airtight seal this way without much fuss.

All Together

So at this point, if you can provide a bag and bellows, I can get you going with a working practice chanter for about $2 worth of plastic. You read that right: $2.

I’m now playing this setup as my main pipe, since it’s the best sounding pipe I have.

Next up I need to design the bellows and the two or three connecting bits remaining. I’m going to try using garden hose for the air supply, it seems like such an obvious choice once you’ve gotten over whether it looks cool.

Once that’s all done, I’ll make a pattern for sewing a bag. I’ll also design pattens for a bag cover and a hose cover, so nobody will have to know you’re using a garden hose and you can pretend you’re using some kind of exotic materials for getting air into the bag.