Hello each, I finally got round to carrying out my long-overdue chanter oil change (olive oil > liquid paraffin) today and, in consequence of having to clean it more thoroughly than usual, devised a novel (to me at least) means of cleaning and re-oiling the bore which I hereby toss into the melting pot FWIW.
Put simply, it's half a cotton bud stick pushed through on the end of a bit of garden wire. The stems (plastic tubes really) cut easily with scissors and snugly accommodate 1mm PVC-coated tying wire (AKA Ry-Tie here in the UK). The end of the wire, being thus sheathed, can't damage the bore. As for cotton buds, they're cheap, disposable, quickly changed and (being white) show the dirt well, etc. Mine's a D chanter, BTW, but cotton buds should conform to smaller bores (they certainly fit most of my chanter's tone holes - themselves smaller than the bore). Just remember not to *pull* the wire until the head's safely through ! And I recommend pushing the bud *down* the bore for 2 reasons: 1 - the reed seat is a slight bottleneck (exit guaranteed if bud goes in) 2 - muck is driven away from the reed area. Cheers, Steve Collins To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
