The Exacting Demands of Bagpipe-Making with @natebanton March...

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The Exacting Demands of Bagpipe-Making with @natebanton

March 10th is International Bagpipe Day. To learn more about what goes into Nate Banton's meticulously crafted bagpipes, follow @natebanton on Instagram.

“The smell of wood is always strong in the shop,” says Nate Banton (@natebanton), a bagpipe-maker living in Portland, Maine, whose bespoke Scottish smallpipes and border pipes are built from more than 20 different types of wood. “Some smells you would recognize, but most are exotic and spicy.”

Nate, who has been honing his craft for over 10 years, says that being a bagpipe-maker is less like being a woodworker and more like being a basic engineer. “We use an engineer’s lathe to do most of our fabrication,” he explains. The craft also requires deep knowledge of many disparate fields, including leather work and reed-making, and an expertise in exotic and domestic woods. Nate acknowledges that these skills aren’t easily transferable in today’s job market: “Our knowledge in all of these things is very specialized, so it’s only useful for making woodwinds and wouldn’t get us a job doing anything else.”

by via Instagram Blog