The other day i was at a Paddy Keanan gig, near Headford, what is the yellow timber his chanter is made from?
Slan,
Liam
Yellow like this ??
Boxwood
The pics above are from a link that David Quinn gave us a while back when we were discussing the chanter he made for Paddy. Paddy’s is the one on top. I’m not sure if the lower one (that looks like Holly) is Boxwood. Maybe it’s stained?
They are both the same wood, i.e. French box. The one on top was stained.
David,
Was it oil or alcohol stain?
Is there a protective coating (lacquer, shellac, etc.) applied over the top of the stain?
I think that Patrick Olwell uses nitric acid (!) to stain his boxwood flutes. It’s supposed to be a time-honored thing, traditional.
The process is called ‘fuming’ and it differs from conventional stain where stain is a colorant applied directly to the wood, fumed instruments are placed ABOVE an acid filled trough in a chamber (sophisticated name for a box) and the vapors actually oxidize the wood making it darken.
Boxwood eh. Thanks for fillin me in. I missed the previous thread aout his chanter. The stain makes a big difference to coulour boxwood.
Cheers,
Liam
Some old makers painted boxwood black, too. The poor man’s ebony. Actually the customers weren’t exactly poor, too. Dan O’Dowd of Dublin had an Egan C set with a painted box chanter, this is the set heard on the early Chieftains albums, and Pipering Vol. 2 of Willie Clancy, first side. This French boxwood Q&K are using is from really big, old logs, as I recall. Wonder how stable it’s proving to be, hmmm? Box tends to warp, look at the Bb set on the cover of Padraig MacMathuna’s record to see some big time warpage.
You can stain box with nail polish, too. Lady Clarol something or another. It’s a beautiful wood in any of its guises. I read once that in the old days, i.e., Renaissance, and a bit later, they preferred a different species of box, Baltic Box. I forget the botanical name, but still Buxus. There’s also castello boxwood, a different species entirely, that Q&K have used. And zapetero boxwood, whatever that is.
Just to chime in about varietal woods and staining: I’ve heard about making sets out of elder, also called boor-tree, Sambucus in any case. The bores are there already (just remove the pith, and refine as needed), and then the maker would boil (?) the wood parts in the elderberry juices. The wood would come out permanently stained black, and after a polishing stood a fair imitation for ebony or blackwood. This would indeed be the poor man’s ebony! That’s an all-purpose plant for sure. I imagine you’d have to do some serious searching for straight branches, though.
Found this tidbit as some anecdotal info gathered from an interview with the fiddler Simon Doherty in the book “The Northern Fiddler” by Allen Feldman and Eamonn O’Doherty.
Simi was talking about using elder lumber for making pipes, I’d imagine. You couldn’t use the twigs as drones etc., although people did make flutes and whistles out of them. I’ve a nice F whistle I made from elder, with a Generation mouthpiece.