The Winding Path

The Winding Path is a marvelous churchwarden tobacco pipe inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's poem The Road Goes Ever On. I have wanted to start playing around with interior contours for a while and this piece of plateaux briar was just asking for it. The indentation and distressing of the path that winds from the top of the bowl to the bottom of the pipe with a small "y" veering off along the stem was a pleasant challenge and a rewarding effect.

I am quite satisfied with the interaction between the design and the wood especially as I was able to do away with a blemish by putting it in the distress.

The Mountain

I have been working on this tobacco pipe for a while. My initial inspiration was from St. Pier Giorgio Frassati who was an avid mountain climber as well as a pipe smoker. I have many friends who are mountaineers and some of whom are pipe smokers and while I am not much of a mountain climber I am most certainly an enjoyer of mountains. So for a while I have wanted to make a mountain pipe and I was hoping to make it not a volcano pipe like so many are. I feel that I have fairly succeeded. If this mountain was a volcano it seems at least an inactive volcano, like many of the Rocky mountains.

The mountain is a freehand pipe made from Italian plateaux briar with a quite modified ring stem. The trees are etched into the surface and I added intentional nicks and gauges to attempt to mimic natural contours. As I was making this pipe I started liking it less and less but now that I have the finished product I have begun to like it again.

The Wizard's Knife

Once again I have revisited my freehand series I call wizards. This briar pipe was made at the request of a friend of mine and so I slightly changed the design specifically to comfortably fit a thumb between the stem and the rim of the bowl as well as adding the knife edge bottom. 

I also turned the stem for this pipe on my lathe from a piece of Lucite rod. I am happy with the result although it took three attempts to get it right. The first stem I ended up making the tenon to small and it didn't fit the pipe correctly. The second stem looked great but broke when I was trying to get it off the rod I was turning it on. The third stem came out wonderfully. 

I'll be posting a couple more pipes this week so keep an eye out for them.

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.