The set is now sold ! Thanks everyone for your interest.
Sylvain
drool!!!,more drool!!! 
I’m starting to develope reg-envy… again. 
those are beautiful, how much does something like that go for?
Asking price appears to be €7,000 :
match with the hunter chanter,oh man!
Very true!
Pat.
Pat D’Arcy is the man , I saw that video on youtube , great inspiration
Nice, but let’s keep this on topic, shall we?
7,000 Euros would likely be reasonable for such a set these days. It’s very sad that Sylvain is being forced to sell them…
Johnny Bourke is not a familiar name to me. Who is/was he? What makes his sets, or this particular one, so laudable? Heh, maybe this will be my new piping goal, keep asking “who is X”. So, since the Hunter chanter was mentioned, who is/was he?
Johnny Bourke is one of the few makers Hunter will speak well of. Ronan Browne also plays a Bourke set with a Hunter chanter. He (Bourke) taught Davy Spillane to make pipes. I’m fairly sure that Donnchadh Gough plays a Bourke concert chanter with Danú.
Spillane says
“I met Johnny through the piping community in Dublin and became his apprentice. It was sort of a medieval apprenticeship where I just turned up and worked. It went from my early days messing around and leaving home, right through to when I started performing with Moving Hearts and beyond. Johnny died about five years ago and it was as much of a loss to me as losing my father. Now I have his tools and a considerable amount of responsibility to continue the pipe-making lineage.”
I bought one of the last sets Johnny made before he died, c 1989, I think, and it was a great set. I was returning from Atlanta to Belfast via Thiefrow, London, and the pipes were removed from the hold by handlers at the infamous airport. Never saw them again. BTW, this set is not mine! But I live in hope that mine might turn up. Anyone recall a Burke set being sold around then on the balack market in London.
I seem to be jinxed,because Dave Williams died just two weeks after he delivered to me the last set he made. Pipe makers will not be in a rush to take an ordr from me, I presume.
I know this set well.Allans Pride and joy before he had to sell them.They are a great set and whoever gets them will not be disappointed.
Allan I believe got them from Cillian O’Briain in the late 1980’s. Cillian was selling them to finance his workshop.
Allan always had the regs bang on in tune. No mean feat!
The set is now sold ! Thanks everyone for your interest.
Sylvain
Congrats on finding your buyer! I never thought it would be difficult, a set like this will sell itself. A beautiful set of pipes, those Crowley style keys are my favorite. I actually play pipes reverse (right hand over left) so I was never in the running as a potential buyer for this set, otherwise I would’ve been very interested indeed! Congrats. 
Well I thought I had to inform you people here that I am the one that ‘robbed’ Sylvain of this precious thing (not like in tommyf’s story above though…). But let me explain that there are good reasons for it: I’m playing a Bourke chanter for over 20 years now, which began to miss its body in recent years. In the '80 I bought a practice set from an Irish man passing through Utrecht where I live, on a cold januari evening. He told me the name of the maker which (as a complete beginner) I immediately forgot. But years later the chanter was quickly diagnosed as a Bourke by experts who came to Holland for our annual Dutch Tionol ( http://www.nvup.nl ). The inevitable damaging of the chanter reed lateron, made me spend 4 years to learn how to make them (and I am still learning… For those interested in solving reed problems: here is my page on the subject, which contains the tricks that work for me in curing gurgle, sinking Back-D and shrieks: http://www.hipesandfriends.nl/GertsPages/id10.htm - please let me know if some of them work for you as well !! )
So when I was tipped by Johannes Schiefner (thanks a lot !) about Sylvain selling his Bourke body without a chanter, I agreed with Sylvain that it fitted the situation for both of us perfectly if I’d be the new owner.
Gert
Can you please remove this image from your webpage:
Everything else aside it’s an ugly mistreatment of the image.
thanks.
Johnny Bourke made great stuff. I have 2 of his chanters and I’m bullin sorry that I missed the body of the set for sale.
Mind you I have a Kevin Thompsom body and as far as I’m concerned, I have the best set of pipes on the worlod ever…
Thompson is my king!!!
Tommy
Dear Peter, I did remove the image immedeately like you wished me to.
Gert