This past Friday (11/3/23), I began printing the updated tenor drone top print, this time, in the correct size!
I had a bagpipe competition in Richmond, VA early Saturday morning, but I let myself into the DKC and pulled it off the printer after nearly 13 hours of printing.
The tree supports looked fantastic, as they always do. However, they were not as easy to remove as I had expected, especially those that were inside the drone. It was a bit of a messy process, but after some snipping, ripping, and sanding, it turned out alright.
Later that night, I popped it onto my pipes to see how it would sound. It was a bit finicky, but I was able to get it to work! By finicky, I mean that the sound produced by the reed was very quavery, and not pleasant to the ears. I messed around with the reed a bit, and tried to situate the drone higher up on the tuning pin, and that seemed to have resolved the problem!
Today, I wanted to add the beading and combing to the drone (these are purely aesthetic, but are a large part of the history and design of the instrument), but I ended up working on the shape of my tenor drone top instead. I should save the beading and combing for when I have my own Blackwood pipes back in my hands so I can take some accurate measurements instead of merely guessing from Google images.
I narrowed down the neck of the drone so that it would look a little less bulbous and a bit more traditional. I also did this with the beading and combing process in mind, as that wouldn’t have looked great on a rotund design.
I also wanted to showcase the sketch (the drawing that later revolves into a 3D model). It’s messy. I know. I like to have all of the lengths (mm) displayed so that I can change lengths by typing instead of dragging and dropping. I often work super zoomed-in, so those labels aren’t as jumbled, but zooming out is stressful and I don’t recommend it.
Anyway- I just copied the tenor drone over to a new project and started testing to see if I could simply stretch it out to make the bass drone.
Nope! Not that easy. I’ll spend some more time on it next week!
Later!
