You’ve probably heard by now about Malcolm McLaren’s synthetic bagpipe chanter reeds. He gives a rough guide as to the strength ratings he uses (13-20) by giving the equivalent values in inches of water for 3 of his reed strengths (13 = 18 in. H2O, 17 = 28 in. H2O, 20 = 35 in. H2O). It is immediately obvious that the scale is roughly linear. So this is a trivial post, I’m just going to fill in the gaps for ya.

The equations are:
McLaren = 0.41095890411 * (in. H2O) + 5.570776255708
in. H2O = 2.431432432432 * (McLaren) – 13.540540540541

Attached is a WORD document, an accompanying PDF copy of the WORD document, and an EXCEL spreadsheet that explains and shows graphically a few of my proposed formulae for the calculation of points awarded to a competitor for a given competition. The red box in the EXCEL spreedsheet is the only number that should be changed; it contains the number of competitors to be used in the calculations.

WORD – OR – PDF

EXCEL