I am just curious to find out what most pipers prefer the old style brass metal parts or silver (when I say silver I mean silver, nickel silver or stainless steel) as it seems to be an equal amount of each being played by performers.
Hi Rory and welcome to the board,
I believe nickel silver and I’m sure stainless steel would look better after years of use and much easier to keep clean. I also think it’s also what you think looks better to you. I like the silver look, but I also like the brass with ebony and boxwood mounts equally.
Seamus 
It really is a matter of personal taste and personal habits. Silver, in its various forms as you’ve noted, is a bit easier to maintain. If you go with brass, it becomes a matter of how much you care whether it is shiny and clean or not. Brass takes a lot of maintenance to keep it shiny. If you’re the type of person to not care what your set looks like, then it really doesn’t matter.
For pipemakers, brass is much easier to work than the different forms of silver, especially stainless steel. Another option is to make the set in brass and then have it coated in nickel plate. This will, of course, wear off in time.
I started with what is called nickel-silver, but found it was still too yellow for my tastes, so I got all the parts nickel plated. Nickel-silver is sometimes called white brass, versus regular yellow brass. If you’re going to get nickel plating, make sure you get it done by a professional automobile plater. The types of cleaners they use are far superior to anything you can get in DIY kits, ensuring a better bond of the plating material to the metal, resulting in a longer lasting finish.
djm
I actually think there is a 19th-century-heyday-of-piping romantic flair about tarnished brass and brown woods and leathers.
I’m in the furniture design business and most people are using silver and stainless for hardware. This line of work exposes me to a large variance of wood colors and hardware selections. My preference for pipes are light colored woods like plumwood (though cocobolo is fine too) with boxwood or antique faux ivory mounts and shiny brass. Yeah… keep them shined up!
Naaa… the grubbier the better I say.
When the set’s 2 or 3 years old people will be asking if it’s an antique.
I thought my brass was tarnished until one lad from near Belfast got his set out and they were almost green/black.
I think it must rain all the time in his town
And there’s maybe a hole in his roof too 
Boyd
I honestly wonder where you get it some times. Silver is not easier to maintain, it turns black in no time at all and it is soft too.
Having cleaned my pipes just last night I can’t say nickle silver is yellow or even yellow-ish at all. I suppose it depends on the alloy you get.
Just look at old Rowsome sets with their silver paint/plate peeling off, you don’t want that either.
Ken McLeod once wrote that Stainless Steel was a material appropriate to the milking parlour and there it should stay. Hear Hear.
Nickel silver (aka German silver) is dependent on the alloy. One can see yellow (or gold!) coming through on my Taylor set. Nickel silver tarnishes nicely but everyone I know over here likes to keep them polished and shiny!
What is nickel silver? “Copper alloys containing nickel and zinc, formerly sometimes called German Silver. These alloys are primarily used for their distinctive colors which range from yellow to silvery white.”
This is very interesting. I’ve got nickel silver keywork on a flute; when I first laid eyes on it, the metal looked almost golden, or somehow tarnished in the way that silver will take on varied colors, yellow among them, but I thought it was attractive. Over time, no matter how I polished the keys, they have turned into a dull grey, almost stone-like aspect. All the polishing in the world doesn’t do anything but make the metal that contacts my skin look like nicely polished stone. I must have some pretty caustic sweat.
Peter, the originator of the thread made clear what he was referring to. I don’t know anyone who could afford solid sterling silver throughout a full set of pipes (though I don’t discount the possibility such exists somewhere). I understand Seth Gallagher was doing SS for a while. Mostly I am referring to the various forms of nickel silver. As noted by others above, it can be any shade from very yellow to a pewter grey, depending on the mix.
Whether silver plated or nickel plated, this coating will wear in time. Perspiration can be very corrosive to plating. I imagine my set will have to be replated in 20 years or so.
Glad to know I can still send you into a fomenting rage, though.
djm
if you like it shiny, once you shine it up, coat the metal with clear nailpolish. it will keep it from tarnishing again.
There are some sets made in sterling and they look quite beautiful when paired with dark hardwoods (african blackwood is what the set I’m talking about used). It’s not tons of fun to clean. Once you have cleaned it, though, all it takes is a light rubbing of beeswax or museum wax to keep the parts not often touched from oxidizing. You can also wrap the set in non-tarnish fabric (available from your local fabric store, but not really super-cheap) and that retards any kind of tarnish action for the silver.
Tarnish on silver is more noticable, because people expect it to be almost mirror-bright. With brass, it seems more acceptable to have it tarnished and/or dull.
Brass and silver both look wonderful, but they each go better with different woods. The contrast between a dark wood and a silver-tone metal is lovely to my eyes, but silver-tone looks a little odd on a lighter wood. Brass works beautifully with lighter tones, and looks fine with dark woods though not as nice as a silver-tone metal in my eyes.
What it really comes down to is how much time you want to spend polishing your instrument and what your personal combination-preference is.
Dionys
As an old salt (I hated polishing brass in the US Navy), I prefer the salty look of tarnished brass myself.
If you ever get the craving to polish them, resist it.
If you want a lot of work to get a real nice patina, try polishing the brass with a piece of chamois leather. They look like gold for about a week or two until the grubby paws touch it and get all that skin stiff on it. :roll:
Silver with black woods, brass with brown. But if someone wanted to give me a present of a Coyne set that didn’t conform to this, I wouldn’t turn it down.
Dionys,
When making buffet cabinets for clients I ask if they want silver cloth lined drawers. The product I use is Pacific brand silvercloth. It has tiny fibers of silver woven into the material and we leave a flap to cover the silverware that absorbs or creates a barrier blocking the oxidants from getting to the silverware in the drawer.
I think a small ‘blanket’ in the pipecase would work fine keeping the metal shiny.
Here are 2 links for suppliers:
http://www.estes-simmons.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=E&Product_Code=PSY
http://www.silverguard.com/yard_order.htm
Has anyone ever seen a full set done in copper?
I’ve only seen one copper half set that I can remember. I liked the look; the wood was rosewood, I believe.
The rate at which ‘real silver’ tarnishes depends a lot on the alloy too.
Higher-silver alloys tarnish more slowly than ‘sterling’ (sterling contains a lot of
copper, 7.5%). The main reason for the copper is to make the silver harder;
pure silver might be a tad soft for keywork (though it can be work-hardened a little,
as can brass).
There are some silver alloys out there that almost don’t tarnish at all; I have a Rogge silverplate set that has never needed a polish, about 8 years on. But I am not sure what the composition of the plate is - it doesn’t have enamel, but it doesn’t look like a rhodium-overplate job to me either. Mebbe his little secret 
, or it could just be ‘pure silver’ (~100%) instead of sterling.
‘Gilding metal’ at about 90% copper looks much like copper and does go nicely with rosewood - even as it tarnishes, which it does pretty fast.
Peter - your set’s Nickel silver as I recall; I think that tarnishes somewhat faster or at least less attractively IMO than sterling, which goes yellowish well before it blackens and tends not to go ‘cloudy’ (i.e. it keeps a shine in the early stages of tarnishing). But YMMV. Stainless tends to keep that same industrial look for ages, if you like that sort of thing
One tip for real silver - keep anything remotely made of rubber out of the case! Vulcanized rubber emits sulfur compounds which accelerate tarnishing.
Silver’s not really all that expensive - at about $6/5Euro per ounce, I think the added cost is only 10-15% of the cost of a full set in the first place. Even in sheet form it’s only a couple of times the bulk silver price.
- Bill
Hi ya Bill. The H is for “Hedgehog” as I recall. No, “Haneman”? Innit?
True Silver was almost never used on pipes in the 19th century, I’ve always assumed due to the cost being prohibitive, even for the Gentleman pipers of the time; was that really the case?
Hiya Kev. Yep, it’s me.
The ‘cost of silver’ thing may well have been true of 19th C. pipes (though I recently saw a real-silver and ebony set engraved 1809, stamped J. [John] Coyne). But this was an exception, agreed; often only the chanter was ebony and the rest of the sticks were painted/stained. So, even allowing for the greater expense/rarity of ebony in those days (transport costs, etc.), it seems materials cost was a significant factor. Oddly, it may be that the ivory was relatively cheaper at that time than the silver and ebony… worth researching I guess.
I think it may come down to the relatively greater cost of labor in the industrialized '‘modern’ economy; you can nowadays buy a lot of firewood and scrap metal
for the cost of 100 hours of labor. At least, if the pipemaker lives in the ‘developed world’. Nowadays I think the total cost of materials for silver+ebony amounts to less than 10% of the cost of a (high-end) set.