I've had a reasonable degree of success at making a square-bore ("segmented turning") version of the traditional-style turned baritone regulator for the Irish Uilleann PIpes:
The greatest difficulty was the keys; they are sawn from 0.094" brass, with a keel made from two pieces of the same material soldered together, then soldered to the bottom of each key to provide the area for drilling the pivot holes. The short keys were simple enough, but the long key with it's bends requires a long, complex keel which requires better precision filing skills than I have to result in a really good quality solder joint, and the bass regulator has two such keys. It's not readily visible in the photo, but there are some gaps in the keel join of that key.
The above regulator, in American Tulip (AKA "Yellow Poplar"), was started just as an experiment, but turned out well enough overall to be a "keeper"; the same cannot be said for the mahogony body baritone, which I had started to finish turning for the Ned White (1810-1879) style; White's style has the traditional turned body, but with wide, flat keys resembling those adopted by the Taylor brothers, also nineteenth century pipemakers. The keys for the White style are much easier to make as they don't require keels, which was the major factor in deciding to go with that style for addition to my traditional style set of pipes.
Unfortunately, upon starting to re-turn I found the glue joints badly open under the surface, so I administered the "coup de grace" with a two by four:
As I've used up two of my three pieces of Honduras mahogony, including making the bass body (also highly suspect now), I may have to put aside the project to make a complete set of these until next year as I can't be spending the money for enough wood to start another set of these until after my first trip abroad, in September, to France.
Regards, John
The greatest difficulty was the keys; they are sawn from 0.094" brass, with a keel made from two pieces of the same material soldered together, then soldered to the bottom of each key to provide the area for drilling the pivot holes. The short keys were simple enough, but the long key with it's bends requires a long, complex keel which requires better precision filing skills than I have to result in a really good quality solder joint, and the bass regulator has two such keys. It's not readily visible in the photo, but there are some gaps in the keel join of that key.
The above regulator, in American Tulip (AKA "Yellow Poplar"), was started just as an experiment, but turned out well enough overall to be a "keeper"; the same cannot be said for the mahogony body baritone, which I had started to finish turning for the Ned White (1810-1879) style; White's style has the traditional turned body, but with wide, flat keys resembling those adopted by the Taylor brothers, also nineteenth century pipemakers. The keys for the White style are much easier to make as they don't require keels, which was the major factor in deciding to go with that style for addition to my traditional style set of pipes.
Unfortunately, upon starting to re-turn I found the glue joints badly open under the surface, so I administered the "coup de grace" with a two by four:
As I've used up two of my three pieces of Honduras mahogony, including making the bass body (also highly suspect now), I may have to put aside the project to make a complete set of these until next year as I can't be spending the money for enough wood to start another set of these until after my first trip abroad, in September, to France.
Regards, John
