Reworking the flashback

Very recently, I've gotten my hands on a small treasure trove of my older work which I'll be cleaning up and selling in order to raise funds to help pay for my wife's cancer surgery.  It's been a fascinating trip down memory lane, particularly in regard to the oldest pipes of the bunch (I've got the first two pipes here that I ever sold!).  A few of these are even unsmoked after all these years, so it should be a nice selection of goodies for any avid Talbert collectors out there as I gradually get the pipes photographed and posted. 

It has brought me up against one annoyance, though, which every artisan can relate to - The chance to look back in up-close dismay at the amateurishness in some of the early work.  In my defense, the late 90's were a different universe from today in terms of pipemaking.  No YouTube How-To videos, no Pipemakers' Forum, no thousands of websites showing step-by-step processes, and no custom makers of pipemaking tooling either.  Everything that I was doing, I had to figure out for myself, as there was no pile of YouTube tutorial videos telling me how to make a turned brass shank end cap. 

In some ways I think this was good, as the profusion of pipemaking help available today has led to a certain sameness in output, in my opinion... Everyone is following the same process steps, aiming at the same goals, and producing very similar results.  But it also produced a lot of learning-by-breaking and learning-by-screwingup. 

A case in point - The 1999 Talbert Briar Yule Pipes.  This was actually the second Yule Pipe set I'd done after a little three pipe foray in '98, but this was a big first for me in lots of ways.  It was the first time I'd tackled doing a matching ten pipe set of the same shape and it was the first time I'd used brass rod (I drilled out and turned solid rod to make the shank end bands for each pipe).

I've got three of these '99 Yules here to sell, but looking at them, I'm choosing to fix a few issues they have to "modernize" them a bit.  To wit:

 

Above is an as-yet un-improved '99 Yule.  I look at it now and am immediately thinking, "Wow, the stem's too fat, it needs to lose a lot of weight in the middle and that ring section needs to be moved closer in to the shank, and re-turned to better echo the brass ring, because right now it doesn't stylistically match at all."

A little work later, and I've tweaked the stem on another one like so:

Purists, I suspect, will be horrified by this altering of past work and I'll probably be getting a few emails fussing over how much better the original looked, even though it didn't.  The revised version removes that awkward visual bulge where the stem was fatter than the shank ring, and retunes the stem's ring to be a much better match for the brass ring. 

More important than the visual are some functional improvements.  Back in '99, I was doing very simple bit slots (All of that stuff about, "You MUST have a deep V slot, blah blah blah" that's considered so important today... NONE of that was given any credence back then).  I really wanted to improve this part of the pipes so I've been widening the bit slot and carrying the V down into the stem to make for much easier pipecleaner passage.  You can see the difference below, with an unmodified '99 Yule stem on the left and a newly-modified '99 Yule stem on the right:

I don't plan on drastically altering the shaping of any of these older pipes, but I do feel that some functional visual and internal improving is well worth it, much like all the guys that buy old GTOs and immediately fit them with four wheel disc brakes!

Made One for Myself

I got a new pipe for myself! (This is probably rarer for makers than collectors, LOL...) I'd been meaning to make myself a new one for a long time, and with the Christmas season coming up I decided to make myself a personal Christmas pipe, drilled to fit Savinelli 7mm balsa filters to mellow out some of the aromatic tobacs I end up smoking during the holidays to pacify the family at gatherings. Here's the pipe:

And yes, that is a dark green stain with a marbled green band attached to a faux-amber stem.  Garish, I know, but I wanted Christmas-ey, festive, and fun. And it's nice just to have a new pipe to smoke, too - First in a while. I do like to make myself samples from my stock to live with for years, just to see how they perform and behave over the long haul. This one is another longterm test of this particular green stain's durability. The stem is the weird bit, though. When we bought the French biz, among the mountains of parts and pieces we got was a box full of diamond-shaped faux amber stems just like this. They're really beautiful and I'd love to use them on Ligne Bretagnes to sell, but I have not been able to because of their bizarre surface color problem. Well, pictures may explain better...

When I first found these stems I was all excited because I thought they were really beautiful, but when I went to sand and compound them, I quickly found they had a really strange characteristic - The exterior orange tint comes off! In the pic above, what you're seeing is the orange exterior coloring of the stem and the stem's face around the tenon is the pale white interior color, which becomes apparent the minute you do any sanding or firm compounding of the material, because the orange comes off like stain. It's very strange, and I've never encountered anything like it before. I don't know where the stems come from or how old they are, but the odds are, "very", so it's left me wondering if the color is an effect of oxidation on the stem exteriors over the years. Maybe they started off whitish and just yellowed on the surface with time. Because I can't imagine any manufacturer actually staining stems, and as it's some form of polyester resin cast, it would never penetrate anyway so its usefulness would be nil.

Weird.

My pipe's stem retains its color because all I did to it was flatten the end, drill the hole for the tenon and filter, and then *very* lightly clean buff the exterior, to avoid removing any of the color. This is fine for me but wouldn't be suitable for a pipe to sell, as it's got a number of fine scratches and surface ripples in it. Smokes great, and the color doesn't come off on my lips or in use, which makes me think oxidation of surface material is the answer.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and all that stuff!

OK, I know this is terribly crude and simplistic and very "1994", but it's my first-ever attempt at doing an animated GIF and I just learned how to make them this afternoon, just for this project.

I wish everyone a wonderful and happy holiday season!

The Christmas Tankard

Good heavens, it's been a long time since I updated the blogs! Finishing up all the FdP pipes turned out to be a much more difficult and demanding job than I'd ever expected, and I've had to mostly leave the blogs unattended for weeks now. On top of this, we've been going through a very difficult patch with the business - unexpected expenses and such - and I just really haven't had the enthusiasm needed to whip out spry and sprightly blog entries on a regular basis. But, I've managed to finish off a variety of difficult things recently, and hope to start the new year off on a better footing.

I always try to do at least one Christmas-ey pipe each year, and this one is my "artistic interpretation" of the season - huge and fat! But seriously, this was initially intended to fill a special request but it just wanted to be huge, much bigger and fatter than the order had asked for, and in the end it became this wonderful seasonal tankard (Since that is the only term that really describes it). I have not yet decided what to do with it - I may put it in our catalog here, but more probably will send it over to Pipe & Pint next week after Christmas. If anyone wants to buy it direct before then, it is 485 euros plus shipping (580 € including VAT for European buyers), and is currently SOLD.

I've also got one of the FdP pipes available, though it is almost certainly going to Pipe & Pint unless someone over here is interested in it. And that's not counting the rather bizarre pipe sculpture that's going to be the subject of my article for my next blog entry....