The joys and dangers of Ebay pipes

[OC Richard]

When you really have a laugh is when there's some elaborate story about the pipes being recovered from the battlefield, or being "bequeathed" to somebody by "the last surviving veteran" and the pipes are entirely modern sheesham-wood Pakistani pipes!

About movie-used props and costumes, I personally would be skeptical, because those claims are usually impossible to verify.

So in the Smithsonian Museum they have "the Indiana Jones hat which was seen in _________ film". Was it?

Because there never was "the hat". On the set in the costumer would have on hand probably at least a half-dozen identical hats, for a big-budget film perhaps a dozen or more. If the hat needs to be weathered, dusty, torn, etc all of the hats on hand would have identical weathering and damage. For a particular shot the costumer would grab a hat and hand it to Harrison Ford, or his stunt double, or a stand-in if he has one. (These might all be in different sizes to fit the various men.) After the film is finished there's no way to know which hats were never used, which hats were used in shots that ended up on the cutting-room floor, and which hats were used in shots that made it to the final edit of the film.

In this particular case fans have gone through the Indiana Jones films shot-by-shot and identified certain specific hats based on some quirk an individual hat possessed. (The same scene is made up of numerous shots and it might be different hats in the different shots, no one can say because they don't keep track of that stuff.)

However in the Bollywood case there might not be budget for "multiples" of props and costumes. I would still want to see a nice clear screen shot of the pipes, to perhaps determine if the purported screen-used pipes look the part.

Anyhow back to Ebay! This seller is calling these pipes "unbranded". They look like they might be older Gibsons to me, when Gibson used nylon for the mounts. Jerry told me that he got a lot of complaints about the appearance of the nylon, which Jerry used because it's very tough stuff. So later he switched to the imitation ivory that the UK makers were using, which looks more like ivory but is quite brittle.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Highland-ba...MAAOSwRUpgEcVX

It's odd how often sellers will have a good number of photos, but all of them taken from exactly the same angle! So the photos are redundant, one would have done. What buyers want are multiple angles so they can attempt to identify the pipes. This is especially true with Gibson drones due to the projecting mounts having a unique profile, but you have to be able to see the drones side-on to tell.

Most sellers just look at the stamp on the chanter, the trouble is that in many (if not most) cases the chanter in a set of pipes is a different maker from the rest of the set. This leads to half the pipes on Ebay being misidentified.

One aspect to this is how often Pakistani pipes happen to have a legitimate UK-made or North American-made pipe chanter in them, the seller then listing the entire set as being made by that UK or NA maker.

Many of the old makers, and some of the new makers, don't stamp their drones. When makers do stamp their drones, the stamp is usually hidden in the "cord guide". Of course an Ebay seller who doesn't know much about pipes has no idea that the maker's stamp will be concealed in this way, so I will message the seller and try to explain how to find the stamps.

Here's the RG Hardie stamp in the cord guide of a vintage Hardie drone. You can see how the cord has to be pulled away from its usual place sitting in the guide, to see the stamp.