A bit of elbow grease

[OC Richard]

Beautiful, isn't it, when dingy metal is made bright and new?

I've acquired a large number of tarnished things over the years- cap badges, waistbelt and crossbelt buckles, dirks, sporrans- but the worse example was a particular set of pipes.

I visited a piper friend and he said "an old guy brought me some old beat-up pipes to see if I could get anything for them."

I was anxious to see them! You never know, with old pipes. My friend produced a very dingy very old set of pipes in a cardboard box. He thought they were unexceptional pipes from the 1960s, and in poor condition. He said "I told the guy he would be lucky to get $800 for them".

I thought they were much older, and though filthy in pretty good condition. I paid the money and as soon as I got home I started cleaning them.

I knew they were Lawries, very old Lawries. Ebony with real ivory mounts, and also mounts of some unknown metal. I'd never seen bagpipe mounts that colour! Chocolate brown. Deeply tarnished. Copper? I had no idea.

I got out the metal polish and started applying the elbow grease. For the longest time the metal looked like some kind of base metal. I thought the mounts might have once been silver-plated but all the plating had come off.

After numerous applications of polish, after around an hour I started to see something wonderful, a dim hint of silver! That hint eventually turned to bright gleaming silver. Not Sterling Silver, but "German silver" or "nickel silver". I knew that Lawrie made identical pipes with thistle-engraved mounts, some Sterling, some nickel.

I wish I had taken "before" photos! But here's "after"



(These photos were taken after I had been playing these pipes for a couple years, and I hadn't recently polished them, sorry!)