How about some back and forth on this? I’ve been rolling staples since I began and would like to hear what the experts are doing.
I roll with a very heavy and rough double cut Nicholson file on a small rectangular board with some leather tacked to the back so it doesn’t roll around on my work desk. I was thinking that if I put the staple into the drill I wind reeds with I could file the reed seat end a bit more fast and accurate, too, but haven’t tried that one yet. I’m making mandrels out of drills, too, since the machine winding process will bend a drill rod mandrel. I could harden the drill rod but I’m content to just shape used drills.
I need to get a better hammer, too, the plastic one I’m using leaves all this residue when I hammer the staple. They make small rawhide mallets with lead inserts, right?
I made a template for my flat chanter blanks out of copper, and glued it to a wood block, which is great, I hate laying things out with a ruler and all. If I want a CP blank I just add a millimeter or so.
Kevin, a small ballpeen hammer should do just fine, both for the initial roll and for some of the early shaping. Tool rod should be more than adequate. You could also use tool rod to make a hand-cranked mandrel, ala Alan Moller.
djm
I use a rawhide mallet with a lead insert that I got from Rio Grande jeweler supply. I glued a patch of leather on one side of the mallet, and find it helps lessen distortion when hammering the staple into the desired shape.
Aaron Welsh
I should also mention the piper who gave me my start, making a new Britton style reed for my early Quinn chanter, which was a marriage made in divorce/annulment if there ever was…this fellow’s rap was staple metal. Copper = dull. Brass = piercing, unpleasant. Silver = electric, bright. Gold = warm, lovely, rich. Platinum = uh, never tried it actually. He made Highland reeds, too, and settled on platinum/iridium. I forget why, exactly! It did the job.
I remember his description of playing a GHB reed with a brass staple after using copper for years = “Like a UFO landing.” Sterling tube is fairly cheap, actually. No gold tube, but a sheet you could get a handful of staples out of is about $30 I think. If you’re game.
I only make my own reeds, so I just need 3 different staples for my chanters.
I use piano wire to make my mandrils (only need 3 or 4 of each staple) because I can make a different mandril easily if I want to experiment. It is much softer than drill stock or drill rod stock, so it wouldn’t work for making hundreds of staples, but it’s good enough for what I need.
I made a slot in my cutting board to start the roll, I center the blank over the slot, put the mandril aligned with the slot and tap it until it Us around the mandril. I have a double headed plastic hammer (a soft black and a hard yellow head) and ease it around the mandril until nearly closed.
I roll a smidge small, using the flat of my vice and a large bastard cut file until the edges seal and measure the ID of the bottom. Tap the mandril further in if too small and roll again until you reach the desired reed seat ID.
Mine are sealed pretty good until I form the eye and I do have to tap it sideways a lot to get that area sealed until it is almost air tight.
Some people solder the seam, I understand, but I could hear no difference, so I don’t bother soldering it.
I use a small plastic-headed hammer and roll around mandrels (which I have made from welding rod). I use wood as an anvil to hammer over as a metal hammer and anvil may spread the metal while working it. I have rolled staples from a variety of metals and have also noticed tonal differences in different metals. Copper is great, brass is bright, sterling silver is a bit tinny but easiest to work, 10K or 14K gold is the best but expensive. Gold has the advantage of not building up oxides inside. I have transformed very old reeds just by cleaning out the oxides from the staples. Nickel-silver and red brass are harder to roll. I find aluminum easy to work but it builds up inside with oxides rapidly. I am working on making seamless staples, with the eye formed by electrodeposit. This has been in the dreaming stages for some time. Some oboe staples are made this way.
Ted
Ted,
Would the wood and softer hammer have the same result on brass tubing as roll your owns? (I use ballpeen hammer and a small anvil presently) That’s the only gripe I have with tubing.
My wife is a Jeweller so I reckon it’s favour time, hand crafted gold staples by a beautiful maiden…
Alan
How about lead? You could make them for someone you despised…
What a great idea to put your old wedding ring to good use! And it’ll never leave yah. 
But seriously, I do have a couple pair of 10K gold cufflinks that might roll out just fine, what do you do…put them on the railroad track, or just start beating them with a ball peen hammer?
Here ye go Alan: http://www.ballpeen.net/gallery/albums.php 
AKA http://www.ballpeen.net/gallery/albums.php
Lorenzo,
I don’t understand the link…
It turns out that I don’t use a ballpeen afterall…
And my wife is shaking her head , reckoning it’s too expensive to use gold (read “I can’t be arsed to do it for you”), well, brass is almost the same colour…
Alan
“I use ballpeen hammer and a small anvil presently” -AB
Just for fun, I put “ballpeen” on the search engine to see if it had a space between the “l” and the “p” and got this funny link with pictures of bald-headed newborn babies…I guess that’s the only connection: their heads look like “hammerheads.” 
I don’t think a metal hammer/anvil would be a problem with tubing, especially if you aneal it, as you are only forming the eye. I hammer the bejabers out of a flat blank to get it to form around the staple. Ununiform spreading of the metal would distort the seam and cause leaks and an unpredictable amount of variation in the final dimentions of the staple.
Ted
Been experimenting with a hardwood block as an anvil and my wifes wooden jewellery hammer. a definite nono, but, my jewellers hammer and the hardwood as the anvil has improved things, the anvil used to cause a spread on the underside that would have a buckle that needed straightening out.
Ted, Do I take it that you have little or no taper on your staples, just an eye?
Alan
Alan,
Most of my staples are tapered, rolled from trapizoidal copper slips. I use several designs, including some rolled cylindrical staples. I have dozens of mandrels made up for all the different types of pipes I have reeded. Most are tapered.
Ted
Why is it that cylindrical brass tube staples (that have only been flattened at one end) will not work well in some chanters, and why is it that both rolled tapered staples and brass tube staples both work in some chanters?
Is the idea to continue the rate of taper from the throat of the chanter up further inside the reed before the taper is reversed, where end of the staple meets the cane? What should we be looking for, in effect, in the performance of the reed? I assume tuning the upper octave is just as easy for both rolled tapered and cylindar tube staples…ie, sliding the staple in or out for internal volume.
What should we make of all these critical staple measurements?
Lorenzo,
No esoteric theorizing from me on this one. Many old designs will only work with tapered staples. Like the oboe, the staple has a much greater rate of taper than the chanter bore. Since the advent of easily available seamless small dia. tubing, some newer makers tuned their chanters to reeds with tubing staples. In my conversations with some of them, they were not aware how to roll staples and tubing was an easy way out. Many have tried modifying the head dimensions to try to make tubing staples work for them with some limited success. Some chanters will work with either kind, especially flat chanters, but some won’t. Why? I don’t have a clue. Why does a Taylor chanter like a reversed taper? For all these questions I take an empirical approach. I try various options and use the one which gives the best results. In his first tutor, David Quinn gave a method of expanding a taper in a tubing staple. He called staple rolling “a difficult job”. I found rolling staples easier than David’s method. Since then he has learned to roll staples as have many reed makers these days. I used to roll staples for a number of reed makers, but most have since learned the art.
Ted
I forgot to add that I generally make a standard size head for a chanter and change staple blank measurements to suit. If a reed is only a very slight amount out of tune in the second octave, I will reinsert the staple to try to get it in tune. I used to have several reeds on hand with different staple designs to try in a chanter, with no reed or measurements to start from, in order to get a staple size that might work with that chanter. As I am lazy, those sample reeds disappeared into chanters that needed reeds which the sample reeds fit. I often wish I had them back. 
Ted
This is good stuff. I don’t want to press my luck with questions, but when you say “will only work” you must mean something specific like maybe… easy pressure for second octave? Stability of certain notes? Tuning? Or do you mean won’t work at all, or maybe close to working?
I have a D chanter that supposedly was designed for a hobby tube staple and I found the pressure needed to play the notes in tune varied greatly within both octaves with any reed I tried, the 2 furnished by the maker and about a dozen of my attempts at that design. All had a sinking back D as well which made it very difficult to play.
I reamed out the reed seat, made a Seth Gallagher receipe reed and there was a world of difference. Much more even pressure over the octaves, a rock solid back D, good hard D and the C natural got some soul to it’s sound.
That’s what I would call the difference between working and not working.
Fancy piper got it right! You can get octaves in tune with a tubing staple where a conical one is needed, but have tuning and balance problems. Some chanters designed for a tubing staple will benefit from a conical or semi-conical staple (Dave Hegarty type). Questions are fine!
Ted