The Home-Buildable Square Bore Uilleann Pipe Chanter
Spring 2008

Background

The square-bore chanter or "Squinnter" is a demonstration of uilleann pipe chanter operating principles in two ways.

  1. The instrument is easily home built with very minimal tools.
  2. It sketches a method of transforming a simple straight conical bore into a better tuned and better behaved complex bore.

The chanter design was published in 1997 on my educational website by the longtime Australian pipemaker Craig Fischer a few months after he helped me perfect my home buildable Penny-Chanter.

The square bore chanter uses 4 thin tapered wooden planks glued together edge-to-face to create a narrow pyramid with a square cross-section. Finger holes are drilled into 2 faces, a reed-seat is bored into the top using a hand drill and common hardware-store tubing reamer, and an ordinary hand gouge is used to create several scoops into one interior side of the bore to improve various aspects of tuning and performance.

Fischer started with measurements I provided of a 1984 David Quinn concert D chanter, and then altered it in a number of ways to become a bore design that was optimized for starting with a straight-cone bore and then adding several short enlargements at strategic locations. The name "Squinnter" is derived from "square Quinn chanter" although in its finished form it is significantly different from the original "David Quinn" chanter.

The Original Method

Click here to see Craig Fischer's original web publication.

Craig Fischer on How to Tune the Hard D Tuning and Stability

(Previously published as: "Pipe Bores and Pipe Acoustics," Craig Fischer, Ceol na hEireann no. 3, 2001.)

Click here to read a partial summary of the article.