It's been a while

So it's been a couple of weeks since I posted my last pipe, but do not fear I am not totally inactive. So here is the run down.

I am currently working on three different pipes. One is a commissioned piece in the Wizard series that will be totting a stem I made. The other two are just new designs I wanted to try out. 

I accumulated a 1" wide upright belt sander. This will come in handy to finish forming some of my pipes but will be especially helpful in forming the stems I am starting to create. 

I sold the Sexton's Churchwarden through a tobacco shop. Tewksbury is where I usually go for my tobacco. It's a great little tobacco shop which also sells wine and fly fishing trips. They have several of my pipes on their shelves on commission and it is so exciting to see long time pipe smokers admiring them and now even buying them.

I have turned several cups and several stems on the lathe. It has been great to learn more about turning, as it gives me more options with stems. 

I have made a couple template pipes. These are pipes  I make out of American Hardwoods (cheap) and I smoke to try to work out particularly difficult designs. It allows me to have smoked and cleaned a pipe a customer might ask about. It also lets me sample different wood flavors. 

Here is my first cup and one of my template pipes. 

Satellite

I have had this Satellite pipe in production for some time now and I am very excited to have finished it. It is loosely modeled off the Cassini Spacecraft. Although I turned the two little thruster engines into one massive engine which makes a fantastic bowl, and the Magnetometer became the Churchwarden like stem. You can take a look at the image I was using to design it here. This is my first pipe to incorporate some metal pieces into it's form. I used hollow brass rod and the mouth bit itself is Briar. The entire stem can be taken off the pipe just like any other pipe. 

I have never seen a pipe of this type before, but another friend of mine is a satellite guidance software engineer and was interested to see what I could do with the idea. I must say I rather like it. 

Gimli's Travel Pipe

Gimli's Travel pipe is a fairly simple sitter, a strong pipe with a wooden stem. The stem is maple instead of vulcanite. The bowl is straight grain plateaux briar. The briar is not stained and the stem is stained with a black stain. This is my first attempt at a wood stem and am quite satisfied with the result. It is also my first pipe with a stem I made on it. 

I call it Gimli's travel pipe, because despite what the movie would have us believe I don't really think that all the Lord of the Ring characters traveled with outrageously long Churchwardens. Sure, those are beautiful pipes but when you're walking for miles fighting with sword and ax, carrying all your own gear  you don't want to bring you churchwarden and risk breaking it. You need an old standard. something strong, pleasant to smoke and nice to look at and preferably shorter than your sword. None would have known this better than Gimli.

The Sexton's Churchwarden

It was suggested to me to try my hand again at a Churchwarden. The Sexton's Churchwarden is the result of that suggestion. On this churchwarden I played around with one of the distressing methods I'm working on. It is stained a beautiful deep red.

I have just finished a fantastic book, Lilith by George MacDonald. In it is the character of the Sexton who is Sexton to the Kingdom of Heaven and also happens to be Adam, the first man. The sexton duties is to  take the dead and makes them alive. In a small way a pipe takes dead leaves and makes them alive in a sort of ethereal manner.

Joshua's Horn

My second horn pipe, Joshua's horn is made of plateaux briar. The beautiful straight grain runs down from the natural curve of the briar to a peterson stem. It is stained with black with much of the stain sanded off. The peterson stem lets the smoke out of the top side of the bit which makes it feel cooler since it doesn't hit the tongue directly.

Joshua, I am sure, had one of these in his tent during the siege of Jericho just wishing that tobacco had already been brought over from the New World so he could smoke the inhabitants of Jericho out of their city instead of blowing their walls down. 

The Wizard's Folly

The Wizard's Folly is the result of making to many wizards pipes in a row without having a new name for the next one, thus the folly. I tried a different method of distressing the rim, which turned out beautifully. Anyway it is another good looking freehand pipe. 

The Walls of Jericho

The Walls of Jericho is a trumpet shaped pipe. The curve of both the pipe and the stem are amazingly simple and beautiful, and ends up looking much like an animals horn. The briar is left at its natural color which is very light on the right hand side and just a shade of red darker on the left side. Even if Joshua didn't have one of these when he marched on Jericho, I'm sure he would have appreciated it afterwards back in his tent.