So do you prefer to have hand rolled tubing or solid tubing for your pipe parts? Any advantages/disadvantages to one over the other?
Oh yeah, another question - can anyone recommend makers with double bass regulator experience?
Double bass regulator?
Brad Angus is your man.
This is Kevin Reitmann’s totally rockin’ 5-regulator Bb set.
Does it still resemble the photo these days?
All of the ferrules on my sets ‘sliding bits’ are hand rolled. They are nicely tapered… something that really can only be accomplished by hand rolling, or so I have come to understand.
Some people claim that hand rolled ferrules and tubing catch the light in different way. Many people claim that hand rolled ferrules look more earthy and genuine than mass produced tubing.
I made a chanter with brass tubing. After playing the pipes for ten years, I could tell immediately why people prefer hand-rolled ferrules. It just looks better than tubing. The tubing I used looks too perfect, too toy-like.
Also, hand-rolling frees you from the limitations of stocked diameters of tubing.
Chris Bayley does Double Bass regulators and other weird and wonderful things such as full sets all in one piece of wood. Somewhere there is a thread showing one but cannot find it.
I’ve watched him roll up ferrules and he makes it look easy.
John
That comes with years of experience, of course. For a novice in metalwork like me, without any formal metalworking instruction, it would be a difficult thing to learn to do, hence I’ve not much choice but to use tubing, as I’ll probably never do enough pipe-making to learn to do hand rolling on any regular basis.
Imay have no choice when it comes to making a ferrule for the mainstock on an NSP set I decided to make a start on, and I look upon the prospect with some apprehension. I’m still re-learning silver soldering, and I can recall having a lot of trouble trying to butt-solder something similar to a ferrule in the past.
If someone is going to put enough time in on pipe-making, though, it’s obviously a very useful art to master, and the old-timers had no other choices; IIRC, if you want to make ferrules out of nickel or silver there may not be any other choice.
John
What is a hand rolled Ferrule or it purpose, 
it is a metal cap to strengthen the end of a piece of wood, now if done properly a piece of selected brass or silver tube can be manipulated to look as good as a hand rolled ferrule, 
you just need to put some effort into it, we have tools & machines to day which make it so easy to do. designs and skills and meterials advance in every way with technology, like in every other trade of to day, stop bloody living in the past, do you think every set of pipes made in the past were good or great, let me tell you, there was plenty sets of pipes that were badly made then, 
than sets made to day without any doubt, 
getting a chanter and drones that play in tune and with ease, is more inportant than if the ferrules is hand rolled or made from tubing on your set of pipes, 
I’ll tell ya!, having a good reed maker near you is as important as good pipe maker near you. all the best.
for those of us with any sense the reason for hand rolling ferrules is that you can use 1 guage of metal for any size of ferrule.
you can make tapered ones just as easily .
all the best instruments of any kind. are HAND CRAFTED.
we owe it to our customers to actually do some work when making what is after all a very expensive instrument.
and manipulating tubing to look hand rolled is ludicrous.
having hand rolled in both sterling and nickle silver i know by experience
that it takes no time at all to make far superior ferrulles.giving the customer more for his or her money.
Ha!ha! you can can buy all your tubing in 0.60 0.80mm or 1mm wall thickness in any size of of tubing, “what do you think a ferrule is?!”, a hand rolled ferrule is a flat piece of plate metal filed to size and then rolled with a soldered seam which is piece of tube, either straight or with a very slight taper, 
at the end of the day it is only a pretection piece.
all the best instruments of any kind. are HAND CRAFTED, there’s plenty of HAND CRAFTED SHIGHT AS WELL made today! there is no reason why Uilleann pipes should be so expensive as prices charged to day by some makers,and all the tosh I hear by makers to try and justify the prices charged with hand rolled ferrules and chanter tops, I can turn and make a chanter in a couple of days with a C nat key fitted, 
some makers are charging five & six hundred pound for the same chanter,
material cost around twenty five pounds, some makers certainly want to give the customer something for there money. like chanters that play in tune in both octave. 
all the best.
This is not true, unless you want to use stainless steel.
This is incorrect. A tube is cylindrical, whereas a ferrule on UPs is conical - thus the need to make them by hand.
djm
Not all uilleann ferrules are conical, but cylindrical tube can be made conical, very quickly, it all depends who’s working the tools.all the best.