…turning old chanters into regulators.
Can it be done?
What about making regulators from brass tubing like the David Daye penny method?
In short, does anybody have any ideas for home-made regulators?
Many would agree that you could tune the car horn to A G or D and it might work for most tunes. Your significant other would be happy enough to have you playing in the garage or wherever else you’d be playing in the front seat so as to elbow (of course we’d have to use the outer part of the bag or bellows elbow) the horn.
Seriously though, my horn harmonizes with a few tunes on CD’s…my daughter thinks I’m mad to drive down a lonely road and blow the horn to the music…then again…she’s right!
In short, does anybody have any ideas for home-made regulators?
It depends how desperate you are. 
Regulators are basically chanters. The name union pipes was basically due to taking a chanter, mounting it in a stock with the drones, and being played in unison or union with the chanter. Tenor, Bass, Double Bass Regulators were added later. Chanter reeds are often interchangeable with baritone regulator reeds.
I’m not sure that a recycling effort would be fruitful for a chanter to a regulator, notwithstanding the many, many recycling efforts out there!
once i get a decent plastic reed method down, I will be working on brass tubing regulators to go with the brass tubing chanter and drones I’ve already made.
take a look at my posts about the “brass chanter” and that might give you a starting point. let me know if you come up with anything worthwhile…
Thanks Antaine
pretty amazing project you’re working on.
Assume for a minute that you had the reeds finished and you were ready to start on the brass regulators. How would you go about it?
What dimensions would you use?
I found a brief mention on another pipe forum about a guy successfully converting an old chanter into a regulator back in 99 but not a word since.
There was also a post a while back by David Daye about home-made regulator keys that seemed fairly easy.
I can’t imagine any of it being too terribly difficult if one didn’t care about the position of the regulator keys. Plug up the chanter and mount the keys on the notes to use. Fit it to the stock and its a regulator…of sorts.
I would do it the same way I did the chanter
either take the measurements given in wilbert garvin’s book, or measure my existing regs using the brass tubing it will eventually be constructed from as probes
my goal is to eventually have a fully keyed chanter, three drones, and three regs along with a bag and bellows…as it looks now, equipment should be under $100, and if the rest sounds like the chanter it won’t be half bad…