I made a couple of reeds this morning, and got to thinking that a very useful service this forum could provide to the world would be a topic that featured little bits of reedmaking advice, stuff that hasn’t made into the reedmaking books. There are people who read these posts who are very good at the bizness, it would be fantastic to pool their advice. Dale could make it a “Sticky” (ewww) topic, one which appears at the top of every page and doesn’t vanish into the archive dispora like everything else we type out here. Some of this will be regurgitated from earlier posts, of course.
The importance of having a good reed to play is far more important than many people realize, I think. Trying to cope with a bad reed is like trying to play the fiddle with a concrete bow.
Here are some starters from mine own desk:
1) When rolling a staple, if the seam gets a bit crooked, I grab one end with a round-nose jewler’s pliers, and twist the other end with a standard type pliers. This gets the seam back on track every time.
2) I use short nibbling cuts with the tinsnips when cutting a bridle out of copper sheet; this helps to keep the width constant.
3) I fold the bridle blank over with the pliers, and see if half of it covers the reed; if it’s a bit too long I shorten it a tad with the snips. For clarity’s sake, call this the right side of the bridle. Then I fold the other half over on the other side, by hand, and bend the rest of the blank over in the middle. Then I fold that part, the left side, back, and cut off the bit in the middle, so the bridle is now the right size/shape/length. Then I fold the left side back to the middle, with the pliers this time - now it forms the correct angle at both sides. Voila, perfect bridles every time.
4) I trim reeds with a sewing scissors. Never had one split on the edges or anything, unless I’d had too many brewtowskis that night.
5) After trimming a reed, sand the inside of the reed with some fine grit (600+) sandpaper, to remove the burrs. I keep a little bit of sandpaper shaped like a pistol or the state of Oklahoma for this purpose.
6) Burnish the inside of a reed with the outside of a piece of cane or a sanding block or the like. Sean Folsom told me about this, he learned it from Ted Furey (father of Finbar and company), it was something the old pipers did, to help the reed settle down more gently.
7) My latest scraping knife is 120 grit sandpaper wrapped around a wine bottle cork. I have to see what’s happening, I’m a disaster with knives, although I still use an Opinel knife to carve the scrape into the correct shape.
8 For the lips of the reed I wrap some 220 grit paper around a flat metal Starret ruler, to insure that they have that nice crescent moon shape. Again, I like to see what I’m doing.
OK, next! And as Geoff Wooff said, get off the Internet and start practicing.
