I was just a half an hour ag olooking at a similar yoke that has turned up. The man who had it said ‘my uncle gave it to me recently’. Left handed body, chanter missing but with a Kevin Thompson cjhanter. End of bass drone a replacement, end of baritone replaced too but original with metal soundbox still with the set. Not sure about the small drone, it did match the replaced part of the middle drone closely. Regs pretty much as in above pics. The owner is going to turn the set around to a righthanded body. Might get a few pics later in the week.
Paul
Followed the link to the Chris Lagan weekend photos but pictures are not as good a quality or size a those posted here. Is it possible to post the full size images as this looks like a particularly nice set.
John
I shoot with a D2X so the images are huge!!! I PM’d you offiering the full sized images. Send me an email.
BTW, I’m leaving tomorrow for Calgary for a week - will ahve to get you the images after I return.
Cheers,
Kirk Lynch sent me pics of the Balderose chanter years ago, and those are at Pat D’Arcy’s site. They’re a tad obsolete now…ah, fine memories.
The theory is that this is John Connor’s set - see O’Neill’s IMM, the big pic of the Chicago Irish Music Club. Connor considered himself the ne plus ultra of airs. Kirk’s pics of the chanter included what looked like a very nice chanter top, with a key that looked to be made from a serving spoon or the like.
Balderose paid chicken feed for the set, too - “The price of a trip to Scotland,” he’s a Cameronian Bagpiper you see - he noticed a box in a trash heap…disgusting!
Also: Tom Busby told me one of his first reedmaking jobs was for a Taylor double with the sky-high E and F keys, so there’s at least one more out there unless it was the Beatty.
The chanter top is original. The whole set is really something else. From my vantage, it is late Taylor.
Someone else rescued the set from a rich homeowner’s trash and rang GB up for the sale.
sorry to drag up a thread from waaay back but Im looking for some info… 
Could anyone tell me what style of keyblocks these are, or if they are a style of a particular maker? ive fell in love with the look of that chanter and must have one 
That’s the Taylor style block. Chris Bayley in England can do a chanter like that for you.
Pat.
<3 you!!! 
Patrick, could you tell some more about Chris Bayley, please? His website looks old and out of date, and there aren’t any records of his instruments.
You know, Chris frequents this board. Why not ask him directly?
He’s probably too busy being a pipemaker to keep a part-time job as a webmaster
True enough, but I see him lurking from time to time. Here’s a couple of photos of Chris’ Taylor style chanters…
I prefer the block style chanter (top pics) to the other variety… for some reason I really dig those big fat keys. 
Does anybody know who else of old makers made these blocks? There was this old chanter with this “cornemuse irlandaise” that I´d like to identify. It is old and has this kind of blocks but they are too crudely carried out for Taylor. The (2) keys were added later (obviously by some conductor or general or so - two left hands, all thumbs) The trims might be non-original.
Cheers,
Hans
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Regarding Hans-Joerg’s post, above:
When I was a child there was a joke - one child makes a peculiar hand gesture and says to the second child “Guess what that is!” “I don’t know,” says the second child. The first child makes the gesture again and says “I don’t know either but there goes another one!”
In that spirit here are pictures of a hulk of a chanter, came with a Taylor style set, origin unknown, earliest sighting for certain near Petersburgh, New York in the 1970’s; rumored to be in Missouri or Mississippi before that. Maybe 100 years old, but that’s a guess.
Nick Whitmer
Craig Fischer once sent me a photo of an old Taylor copy, two keys like that one and weird choices (C nat/High D), but done in boxwood instead of black stuff. I remember him saying that all the Taylors he’d looked at had really bad metalwork, wobbly lines cut in ferrules especially, making me wonder if he’d only seen copies.
Ted Anderson has a Brennan chanter that Patsy Touhey gave to John Cummings, an old San Francisco piper who owned the Taylor set Ted now has. Patsy presented it to Cummings when he was out for the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair or the like. I think this chanter had only two keys, and the long blocks. The set’s orginal chanter is a Taylor double - not a copy! As nicely done as the rest of the set.
Matt Kiernan used long blocks for the regulators - wonder where he got that idea?