I repaired a reed today that I thought might be a ‘goner’ ; it had 5 cracks in it, two of them all the way to the binding, and one corner was destroyed. I only photographed one side (the ‘worst’ one); some of the cracks were only visible if the reed was flexed or under very close inspection, but this crack could not escape notice:
You can still see the (repaired) crack in this photo, but after trimming the corners and re-scraping the reed a little, it plays almost as well as before:
That’s actually a type of tinned wire that I got at Radio Shack. But you can use 22 gauge copper or silver wire. Probably you can get silverplated 22 ga copper at craft stores.
(But don’t use brass, or titanium, etc. in that gauge because it’s not soft enough.)
Those reeds are close to the dimensions used by David Daye as posted on his website, or those published in David Quinn’s “The Pipers’ Despair”. IIRC those two sets of measurements are pretty similar.
It’s a tapered staple, reed head 13.4 mm when complete (I think the slip was 13.0), length of scrape 25 mm, overall length 84mm. That’s good for a Rowsome-type chanter that might tend to run sharp with a smaller reed, at least in my experience.
