A LOW-COST FLOOR-STAND FOR THE BAGPIPE

A LOW-COST BAGPIPE FLOOR STAND

Having found at a number of gigs that waiting doing nothing with the stand of pipes hanging from my hand gets tiring after a while, I decided to make myself a floor-stand for the pipes.

It turned out that this can be done quite cheaply and easily, modifying an economy guitar floor-stand you can find on Ebay for $15-$20, including postage from China.

You can see below the stand as it came, set for a guitar, the parts I modified, and the floor-stand holding my stand of pipes; those are heavy, silver and ivory mounted, and the stand has no problem holding them up.

The stand set for a guitar	The modified parts	The stand with pipes

Just a few modifications are necessary to transform the guitar floor-stand into a pipe floor-stand:

- The top folding "fork" that receives the guitar neck is removed from the main stem by drilling out the rivet that forms its pivot.

- The pop-out knobs that hold the "fork" in position when unfolded are removed (pushed in), and their holes opened out to 8.5mm, then opened out on both sides with the corner of a square needle file, to locate the folding bottom support in the horizontal position when in use.

- The folding bottom support has its 8mm steel stem threaded over a 15mm length to take an 8mm wing-nut, and it then fits at the top of the upright stem in the newly-opened holes.

- To prevent the vertical stem tube from being squashed when tightening the wing-nut, a 25mm piece of hard-wood dowel, or of metal tube, of suitable diametre, is inserted at the top of the tube, and cross-drilled to 8.5mm.

- When folded, the stand takes little room and fits easily with the pipes inside my pipe-case.

- This is not meant for long-term display of the pipes, given the risk of the bass drone warping under its own weight.
For long-term use, I would add to the top support half of a 90cm length of 75mm plastic drain pipe, cut in two along its length, to provide support along the whole length of the bass drone.

Enjoy !

© Renaud Olgiati 2018-2019

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
For any questions or comments, I can be reached at renaud@olgiati-in-paraguay.org.

Last revision: 2019 11 06