Near the end of 2002 I ordered and pre-paid for 4 key narrow bore chanter from Davy Stephenson. At the time, I was told he had a piece of ebony that was bored and seasoned, so it would only take 2 months to complete the deal. The chanter was to be based on Peter Hunter’s pattern.
As many here know Davy suffered many setbacks in life and it seemed as soon as he had gotten over one, another popped up. There was a time he had given up on pipemaking and returned to a ‘normal’ job. Although I must have sent him 100 e-mails and heard every excuse in the book ‘we’ persisted with our lives. Early this year a package arrived at my doorstep. In it was a chanter. It’s not the chanter I originally ordered, but it’s a chanter and narrow bore at that.
I haven’t played pipes in years and I’ll need to decide what to do here as far as securing a bag and bellows, but I thought a photo and some words about Davy’s craftsmanship would be enough for a while. If… there is a flaw in his workmanship, I haven’t found it. Everything is crisp, tightly fit and all the holes are cleanly done. Nothing less than perfection.
So… here it is, a Stephenson narrow bore D chanter… in… in… in what looks to be rosewood and ebony mounts.
I shot this in low lighting without a flash so the image is very grainy, sorry. The original sized photo is here:
http://angar.net/pipes/narrow_d.jpg
The image is just over 3mb
