If We Didn't Love Them, We'd Hate Them

For the first year or so, Evan's bagpipes exhibited very few ornery tendencies.  That has all changed!  They are giving him and us quite a few headaches these days.  it started slowly several months ago when he discovered that his drone pipes had some small cracks in them.  Not too big of a problem as the weren't even a year old, so our dealer took them back, sent them to Scotland to be repaired or replaced and gave Evan temporary replacement parts.

Then there was that little incident before the MACHE performance when Evan accidentally tore a little  (but very important ) flap off.  Aside from giving me high blood pressure for about two hours, not too big of a deal.  Chris, master bagpipe repairer, fixed it enough so that Evan could perform.

Well, that was pretty much the beginning of all sorts of problems.  It turns out that my dear son produces a lot of spit which gets into his bag and out onto his reeds and makes them moldy (gross, I know).  Well, to remedy this moist problem he needed to insert something into the bag called a water trap.  After weeks of trying to get this thing in and working it finally got in.  All seemed good until Evan found his pipes almost impossible to play.   It didn't take long to find the problem, an almost 1/4 inch hole in the bag.  He got that fixed a week ago only to be told that his bag was still leaking air.

Apparently, Evan wasn't pouring goopy stuff (called bag dressing) into his bag often enough and so air was leaking through the leather bag.  That was easy enough to fix.  Pour more goop in and presto no leaks.  All seemed to be going peachy until yesterday when Evan discovered that his bag is leaking again!  GRRR!  If they hadn't cost so much money I think Evan would have thrown them across the room several times by now.

Now all this seems like maybe he got a faulty or cheap set of pipes - not so.  All this is totally common amongst bagpipe players.  Apparently, bagpipes are some of the most temperamental instruments on the face of the planet.  Thankfully repairs are relatively inexpensive!