J.E. Brennan Book w/ Plans

[rorybbellows]

Where'd ye get dem profiles Rory.... from a condom selection chart perhaps ?

Good one Geoff, geez I wonder if thats where the taylors got their ideas for staples shapes.

RORY

[CHasR]

Rory there may be more than you think to your suggestion

http://cigarhistory.info/Cigarmaking/Ci ... 85_II.html

in the 1880's--

PHILADELPHIA had 1,014 Cigar factories, 136 with 10 or more rollers,
all of them in the 1st tax Dist. of PA
Boltz, Clymer & Co., 50 North 3rd St. [200], Fact. 2715
Gumpert Bros, 23rd & Sansom [150], Fact. 2699
Gray, Morales & Dalton, 514 Pine [150], Fact. 262
H.A. Jeitles & Co., 1618 Chestnut [100], Fact. 100
Lichten Bros., 5th & Cherry [150]. Fact. 680
Mange, Weiner & Co., 1106 Montgomery Ave. [400], Fact. 121
Juan F. Portuondo, 1114 Sansom [100], Fact. 540
Antonio Roig & Langsdorf, 710 Arch [100], Fact. 872
Theobald & Opppenheimer, 111 North 3rd [100], Fact. 268


Five of these firms are within walking distance of (what we suspect to be) the Taylors shop location in Olde City Philly.

So then all you staple-hunters...how likely is it that cigar rollers would moonlight in uilleann pipe staple manufacture?

Seriously, Philly was cutting edge of light manufacturing back then. It would not be problematic to find a precision sheet metal shop able to subcontract QC product down to .001" specs.

[rorybbellows]

PHILADELPHIA had 1,014 Cigar factories, 136 with 10 or more rollers,


Theobald & Opppenheimer, 111 North 3rd [100], Fact. 268

?

Didn't that company make exploding cigar's

RORY

[CHasR]

PHILADELPHIA had 1,014 Cigar factories, 136 with 10 or more rollers,


Theobald & Opppenheimer, 111 North 3rd [100], Fact. 268

?

Didn't that company make exploding cigar's

RORY

not until the 40's

[rorybbellows]

Good one lads ,that was a laugh !

RORY

[Mr.Gumby]

Just to go back to the subject at hand: I just received the book which is essentially a scanned facsimile of a note book and a bunch of photos and clippings, accompanied by a bunch of loose prints of larger drawings. No attempts have been made to interpretation, comment or placing in context. Interesting historic material to look at.


$25 for postage was a bit much though.

[BzzzzT]

I imagine a double sided box form with the inserts for top and bottom to go Inside and support the staple whilst it is being pressed to shape....

That crossed my mind too after writing the above - perhaps two pieces of metal with the staple inside, metal pieces are put into a vice, they would press the whole staple to flatten, so no hammering involved - took me till now to remember the fancy metalworking term for such a device - "mould." Well, not so fancy maybe.

Fanciful Theory Number B - how about filling the staple with lead, and forget all this mandrel business in the first place? Melt it out when done, and solder. Or maybe the solder is the remaining lead itself...most soft solders melt at ca. 400 °C (752 °F), lead itself at 621.5°F (327.5°C). OK, just fill it up with solder itself.

But then Busby wasn't messing about with furnaces/ladles et al. Doesn't seem the Taylors passed along any of their specialist kit to customers here, but then that was the age of proprietary skills.

Fanciful Theory Number C - farm out the staple work to someone else. Don't know who would have a specialty that could do double duty in forming odd shaped woodwind staples though. Well, except an oboe/bassoon shop...I was thinking about Phil Wardle's comment that bass regulator extensions like on his Coyne were such beautiful pieces of work that maybe these pipemakers simply went to brass instrument manufacturers to have the job done, as they spent all day long bending different shorts of metal tube.

Several good points here Kevin.

Yes it could be possible to Cast Lead or Soft Solder mandrels to help produce these unusual Staples.... but it is an awfull lot of trouble to go to.

The idea that, during the Classic period, Pipemakers got specialists to do some of the work is very likely the case. I have noticed that certain pièces were exquisitely well produced.... there being quite a few 'Trades' needed to produce a set of pipes and back in the day a Trade was very defined and controlled...

Humbly, I might add that it is VERY hard ( for the bloke who makes all the bits himself) to bring every part of a new set up to the standard of the Classic makers.

One man I met in London, years ago, was a Hardwood Turner ( did not turn Softwoods) and that is how he ended up working for the Musical Instrument makers and eventually worked at Rudal and Carte producing Flutes.

I imagine the Taylors had access to several patternmakers. I think it would of been easy to have some sort of die made for their staples. I imagine these two trades crossed paths in some fashion. To me there is nothing finer for reeds than, good long Victorian English patternmaking gouges and chisels.

THANKS! for the measurement Geoff. I imagine that the Brennan plans correspond or are heavily influenced by the Taylor bores??? It would be interesting to voice a chanter to a standard staple and one with a reverse staple, to see which has better characteristics. If I ever get around to experimenting with the plans; I may try this. A reverse staple still makes me nervous, not to mention voicing a chanter in the first place!

- Jason

[Kevin L. Rietmann]

My copy arrived yesterday, it's an entertaining bit of history all around. Don't know how much luck you'll have actually utilizing the measurements though, which are very simple, and as we've discussed here the resulting instrument might not be what you're after - incidentally, A=435 or "diapson normal" was another common pitch in the old days and the Balderose Taylor was perhaps built with that in mind. I've a few old American and German flutes that are like that - with their tuning slide in all the way if you blow like crazy you're in tune, but the ideal would be with the slide out a titch, if not more. French and English flutes I've come across are more commonly in A=440, or higher in the latter case.

The posters with the Brennan book had to be folded in half to fit in the envelope and it would have been nice to have them in a mailing tube instead but that would make the postage even more exorbitant. That's a minor quibble though, I'm glad to have this on the shelf.

[Driftwood]

So, the Touhey Taylor chanter played happily at 35 cents sharp of A=440hz. and has a nice clean, fruity tone, that certainly is not as loud as the way some people have their chanters going these days but I'd judge it to be very similar in volume to a Leo Rowsome chanter with a 'Leo' reed in it.

I've just been watching some NPU videos of Sean Mac Ciarnan playing this set and it sounds like it's bang-on A440. Also I think I can see a wire rush down the bore in one of the photos in the 2009 NPU calendar as well as a roll of paper or something in the E hole. Things change through time it seems. The sound is very distinctive:- to my ears it has a lot of treble in it but limited harmonics perhaps -but that is through my computer's puny speakers.

[geoff wooff]

So, the Touhey Taylor chanter played happily at 35 cents sharp of A=440hz. and has a nice clean, fruity tone, that certainly is not as loud as the way some people have their chanters going these days but I'd judge it to be very similar in volume to a Leo Rowsome chanter with a 'Leo' reed in it.

I've just been watching some NPU videos of Sean Mac Ciarnan playing this set and it sounds like it's bang-on A440. Also I think I can see a wire rush down the bore in one of the photos in the 2009 NPU calendar as well as a roll of paper or something in the E hole. Things change through time it seems. The sound is very distinctive:- to my ears it has a lot of treble in it but limited harmonics perhaps -but that is through my computer's puny speakers.

Well, it was 2001 when I made the reeds for Sean... who knows what has happened since... maybe he has been somewhere else and got different reeds... but at the time he was very happy with the way he had his regulators tuned and that had taken him a lot of effort so I measured the pitch that the regulators were playing in and made the chanter reeds to suit.... and that came out at 35 cents sharp of A=440hz.
It is not my practice to work with wires, tape or bits of rolled up paper but as you say things change, or people change things!

[mke_mick]

Just got my own copy. Definitely worthwhile for anybody interested in pipecraft (or sufficiently obsessed with uilleann pipes in general), but as previous posters have noted, this is an unadulterated, unmoderated photocopy of a pipemaker's notebook; nothing more, nothing less.

As others have noted, Brennan's own title notwithstanding, it isn't a primer on pipemaking! Too much is left unsaid and assumed. There is isn't a single drawing, for example, of any tool or mandrel, or even any mention of any.

And the drawings, as cool as they are, are nothing so detailed as what you'll find on NPU's "The Source" website. Nor is it even clear as to how far along as a pipemaker Brennan was when he made these sketches: was he a master pipemaker preserving hard-earned lore for posterity, a beginner making notes in the process of learning, or somewhere in between?

As a practical matter, the book leaves me with two questions in particular: does Brennan show a straight-tubing staple for his chanter/regulator reeds because his chanter design has some compensating feature (compared to the Taylors' designs) that obviates the need for a reverse taper, or did Brennan simply not know how to make a reverse-tapered staple? The double-reed drawings are especially sparse.

Second, why such a dearth of bore information, especialy for the conical bores? Half of Brennan's drawings seem to lack any depiction of the bore (e.g., your standard dashed lines) -- sometimes there's only a "start" and "end" internal diameter -- let alone detailed measurements showing perturbations. This leads the reader to assume that either Brennan always used a perfectly linear taper with no perturbations, or, more likely, (right?) that he reamed the bores that way initially and then added perturbations "as needed" (e.g. with spoon bits) after the fact; presumably in a purely spontaneous (inconsistent) way that wasn't worth writing down.

Oh well. Taken on its own terms, it's an interesting read, and an important historical document. Precious little else seems to have been passed down to us from the Taylors or anyone else from that scene/period.

Regards to all,
Mick

P.S. It's worth noting that Breannan's schematics for Highland and "reel" pipes appear to be more likely to be useful to the hobbyist for actually producing a working instrument (not that I'm the best judge by any measure) -- they seem to have a higher level of detail, and of course those instruments are, mechanically, lots simpler. That part's a pleasant surprise! I was interested to see that even in 1920 or thereabouts, ebonite was the material of choice for the GHB blowpipe.

[Kevin L. Rietmann]

Brennan wasn't that hot a pipemaker actually. One set had a square section tonehole for the G note on the bass reg...well that's just weird, actually. The work on his sets just wasn't as polished as some of the other Taylor fans, all told. Some were not half bad, a few were just godawful, really. Another set, I was told, had a very crude exterior but not bad at all inside, the theory was that the Taylors would bore stuff out for him and he could finish it up on his own - he made bellows for them, remember. Or that was the story, anyway, forget what the source was.

Pipemakers used to have a pretty casual attitude about measurements, or so it seems anyway. Actually about the only other example of notes I've seen was O'Meally's stuff, which was pretty straightforward too. Perhaps there was a meticulously detailed book kept by the Taylors and it's lost now. I've never even heard of a Rowsome pipemaking book, actually. Certainly to look at the Ginsberg plans even most revival pipemakers weren't/aren't big on measuring every last little aspect of things. I've seen a couple of quick sketches of chanters from old time musicians and they were very basic, too. The idea of measuring things down to the last .5 mm in both dimensions is a modern one that had its origin in the baroque classical revival, I believe. With these pipemakers perhaps there was more of a practical approach, i.e., note is faulty here so ream out there to fix, apply as needed, rather than scoping everything out beforehand.

[MichaelLoos]

Has anyone got Phillypiper's email address?
The contact form on his site doesn't seem to work, at least not from Germany.

[Mr.Gumby]

doc at phillypiper.com should do it.

[MichaelLoos]

Thanks very much!