Chiff and Fipple Forums

Just a bit of general advice to anyone thinking about purchasing a new set of Highland pipes: the time is now and the place, for people in the USA at least, is Canada.

The Canadian dollar has been hovering around .72 USD which means a 30% discount for USA buyers of Canadian pipes.

Perhaps the finest pipes being made anywhere right now (that is, if Dave Atherton is taking another hiatus) are the pipes made by Rick Pettigrew at Dunbar Bagpipes. They're hand-turned and the craftsmanship, combing, beading etc is as good as anyone's. Dunbars in African Blackwood or Cocobolo are tonally very similar to early Hendersons and Lawries- I compared the silver-mounted new Dunbars my Pipe Major just bought (for around $1,500 US, amazingly cheap for silver-mounted pipes) with my c1905 Lawries and their tone is nearly identical.

And if you want a tonally superb MacDougall reproduction, Dunbar makes those too.

I'm going to be ordering a fine Cocobolo set which will be under $900 US (though I might upgrade to fancy hand-engraved mounts which are also a bargain at this time).

Yup. Sucks for Canucks when our dollar drops.

But I recently discovered Fisher Bagpipes - not too far from home either.
All handmade stuff. I'm heading out this week to pick up some Border pipe chanters Wayne fixed the tuning on for me.

http://www.fisherbagpipes.com/

I tried clicking on that link, it says the site owner has exceeded his bandwidth limit.

Just tried again, his site is offline.

But his pipes can be viewed here, on the Island Bagpipes site:

http://islandbagpipe.com/csi/?page_id=136

About "buying Canadian" a Canadian piper warned me yesterday to be sure to view a Canadian maker's site in Canadian Dollars, and order using the Canadian pricing, because some Canadians are jacking up their prices when selling to people in the USA.

So I did buy Canadian.

Too bad the Canadian Dollar went up from .69 to .74 between the time I first checked Dunbar prices, and the time I sent payment.

I'll post pics in the "pictures of your pipes" thread when they come, but basically I ordered the Cocobolo pipes with the vintage Glen-like profiles



but having ferrules and ring-caps like this, Premium Antique Thistle hand engraved by David Davidse



The overall look will be like this, except in Cocobolo (instead of Ebony like this vintage set)

The Dunbars came yesterday! They're lovely.

Snapped this photo in the dark, I'll try to take better pics later.

Vairy handsome!

I deleted that bad pic, here's a better one.

Cocobolo with hand-engraved alloy mounts. In person the wood all matches, but somehow in photos not.



These are travel-anywhere pipes. Ivory and ebony are banned from international travel, so my old pipes were doubly banned!

Since I wasn't crazy about the super-bright aluminium I did a DIY project of antique-ing them.

This shows the true colour of the wood too.