For personal reasons, I’m going to sell my full set before 4-6months.
It is a concert pitch made by Dave Williams in 1985
It’s in excellent condition ; A restoration was collectively made by Jacky Proux & Alain Froment last month (about 30 working hours):
Some welds were redone, certain parts in metal strengthened (without altering either the aesthetics or the sound of the instrument), the leather plugs were changed, keys re- plated, etc.
This set is perfectly sealed !
The bellows (very comfortable/light) has an excellent return and has no leaks: it was made last year by Jacky Proux.
It’s quite easy… you can play with your D chanter upon 3 E drones.
There are tunes which permit that.
On the 11th picture you can see the “E ivory ring” on the bariton drone… but I must confess I have never used it.
Patrick ya goober! ye can’t tell the difference between mammoth and elephant in those pics…even the experts need to use a magnifying glass and measure the angles of the cross hatching grain patterns…ya silly bean
Looks exactly like my mammoth ivory, that’s why I said it. It doesn’t look as brown as other elephant ivory. Another way to tell the difference is by colour. Mammoth is greyer between the white lines and the mammoth is browner.
It doesn’t make a hide 'nor hair of a difference in my opinion. Has anyone actually ever been nabbed for having elephant ivory on their pipes? If you did, please start a new thread.
Pat, man, law is law. Not everybody is going to want to deal with those hassles, and selling anything under 100 years old with elephant ivory on it, across borders, is a CITES violation (don’t take my word for it, read up on it at www.cites.org). The USA currently allows an exception for bagpipe mounts of african ivory when crossing borders for noncommercial purposes with pipes as hand luggage, but many other countries do not recognize that exception. It doesn’t cover commercial transactions or cross-border sales, which are still a no-no.
Given that, the remaining discussion revolves around whether enforcement is strict or lax, relatively. Could you get an ivory mounted set into the USA as hand luggage? Probably (though you might be asked to provide proof of ownership dated to before your trip). Could you travel with that set afterwards, without incident? That’s a more difficult question to answer.
I’m with Bill on this but for less idealistic reasons.
Whether people have been stopped or not, if I were to lash out 10,000 euros (approx. US$15,650) on a set of pipes, I wouldn’t want to run the risk of being stopped at a border crossing or in an airport. When you pay that much dosh, you don’t want any hassles.
This is basically my point too - I’m not trying to make a “law and order” argument - and frankly I think it’s difficult to make much of an ethical issue in this case either, since I don’t think that sales of used ivory-mounted pipes are likely to promote poaching even indirectly (unlike, perhaps, jewelry, netsuke, and widely traded “luxury goods.”) I’m just stating the practical impediments.
After all it is legal (and many would say harmless) to buy and sell legally-sourced pre-ban ivory within a country’s borders, and a few people are still choosing to make and order new sets of pipes with such legally-sourced ivory mounts. A purchaser should make an informed decision about the likely future limitations on resale and transport of such an instrument, however.
