Steampacket wrote:
Apparently good for the back d, hard D, and second octave.
From C&F uilleann forum thread: Reverse taper staple - Thu Apr 07, 2005:
"The thing with the Touhy staple that Geoff has is that it actually has a double taper, its narrow at the head, widen's out then narrows down at the end again. Geoff can't figure out how it was made !!! " Rory Bellows
I think Rory's quote misinterprets what I may have said. Of course the staple has a double taper i.e. it tapers down towards the eye end in one plane but tapers outwards towards the eye end in the other plane. This makes it very tricky to form around mandrels that have the exact internal shape. I'm refering to the Taylor staples that were made ( by them ?) for the Patsy Touhey set.
Recently I made some staples for C and B chanters using 3mm ID brass tubing with a 0.5mm wall thickness. By annealing the tube and gently beating on the mandrel until the eye was quite wide with a fairly closed mouth , probably 4.6 x 1.1... I started to get those reverse cone staple effects mentioned above . So, as Chris Bailey suggested to me, perhaps one does not NEED to make a reverse cone staple blank or exagerate the conicity for those chanters that appear to prefer reeds made this way.
I suggest trying a wide eye, but fairly closed, and tie onto it a TAPERED HEAD, where the head width at the eye end of the staple is hardly wider that the staple eye.... thus the cavity transition , from head to staple , has little or no 'dead' pockets.