Barrel Drone Half-Set For Sale - Photos Added

[Jumper]

I played the Soefirne one made by Dave Evans and from what I remember it worked fine. Their design was much compacter than Chris': basically a stock with three tiny little things sticking out that you could switch off separately. Shuttle drone type.

[stew]

I did two years at a wood turning school, and let me tell you what some of them older boys in there could do with a piece of wood on a lathe was no ones business, I still think one could on a well centred lathe, and with a hollow drill guide in the tail stock, could drill the bores, without rotating the stock, useing quality long drills rotating at 150-200rpm, try not putting to much force on the drill bits when cutting the bores, one would also have to keep cleaning and cooling the drill bits when cutting the bores, you could do a test run with a rough peice of timber first just to see if it was possible, no harm in trying.

[stew]

Mike do you know if Chris is back from holiday? anyone heard from Chris.

[Mike Hulme]

Chris will be back next week.

[stew]

Cheers for the info Mike.

[Chris Bayley]

Hans wrote

Chris, how do you set up your lathe in order to make these paralell bores?

I use a four jaw independant chuck to hold the workpiece off centre. Free end is supported with a hollow center and boring is now carried out with pneumatic gun drills which run very cool. Originally I used 'D' bits and this took a long time as the workpiece tended to get quite warm.

Do not know how McGregor did it but would guess he was familiar with ornamental turning techniques and manuels written by Plumier and Bergeron which used a 'cage' to offset work.

Peter Laban wrote

Peter Laban wrote:
I played the Soefirne one made by Dave Evans and from what I remember it worked fine. Their design was much compacter than Chris': basically a stock with three tiny little things sticking out that you could switch off separately. Shuttle drone type.

Have made one to the shorter design based on the length of the Tenor drone which requires more bores to the baritone and Bass drone. I prefer the longer McGregor style which is based upon fitting two regulators

This uses three bores dedicated to the Bass Drone, one for the baritone which also has an extension in the main stock. The Tenor drone is a seperate unit which plugs into the barrel.

All of the McGregor barrels I have seen have drones that tune out of the end of the barrel unit however there is a photograph in Frasers "The Bagpipe" show a set which has Musette du Cour style Layettes.

Chris