The Past - You can run from it or learn from it

The Saruman

Let's roll back to 1998.  We all accessed the net with dial-up modems and most online pipe chat happened in Alt.Smokers.Pipes and on IRC.  The Lord of the Rings movies hadn't come out yet, and there was no advance publicity about them.  LOTR was still simply this quiet, understatedly amazing fantasy series known mainly to voracious readers and fans of fantasy and SF.  Back in that distant time, I'd been making pipes for a few years for friends, and the main theme I kept returning to was LOTR.  I'd done hobbit pipes, Lothlorien pipes, and more.  But once I'd won the Pipes & Tobaccos carving contest and interest started to pour in, I wanted to up my game and start making some genuine, professional level pipes to sell.

(A side note - Originally I took this pipe and two others to a local brick & mortar shop, which was the traditional way to sell at the time.  The pipes sat in their shop for a week and they called me to say come get them, they're not selling.  Being savvy in this new internet stuff, I took them home and sat for an evening and wrote up my very first website, then put them on it.  All three pipes sold immediately and I pocketed all of the money instead of half of the money.  With that one event, my career, and selling philosophy, was set in motion)

This pipe was the first I ever sold.  With it went a scroll that I wrote up and signed, along with some printed-out comments from Usenet, February 1998.  Recently it's come back here as a donation to help with our fundraiser for my wife (Full details HERE), after she and her parents suffered a string of health issues and natural disasters all through the nightmare year of 2018.

Getting it to a saleable condition, however, was a challenge!  I would ideally have left it as-is, but the stem literally fell out of the mortise, it was so loose.  Back then I turned it too loose to start with, and didn't know enough to ignore a bit of very bad advice I got from the internet, the old "Heat and squish" trick.  A lot of guys will tell you this - If your stem is loose, just heat it up and press it against something and it will bulge and then fit tighter.  This is an awful "solution" because what you get is a tenon with a wide part that will eventually wear the mortise down to its own size, making the rest of the tenon not contact, wobble, and eventually loosen and fall out.  But, alas, I didn't know any better and 20 years later it came back to haunt me.

This was going to be a major challenge, because it needed an all-new tenon but I had to fit it, centered, into an original stem that was hand-rounded, do it without taking any thickness out of the thin mortise walls, and be able to match the naturally-colored 20yo stain for any parts I did sand.

Annnd... Wouldn't you know it, but the original stem exploded when tightening in the threaded replacement tenon.  >POP< and that was it.

BUT, once it was obvious I needed to make a whole new stem, I was really quite happy, because I feel like now I can do a considerably better job than I did on the original:

Also, I had the chance to improve one aspect of the design.  Back then, I drilled the pipe as a moisture well/expansion chamber pipe, Peterson-style.  The airholes of stem and shank deliberately did not connect and the well took the moisture.  Over the years since, I've come to prefer a connected airhole, and I had the chance to fix this quirk on this pipe by using a technique I dreamt up 15 years ago or more, the guided tenon outlet.  In a nutshell, rather than having the airhole centered in the tenon tip, I drilled a smooth, subtly angled airhole within the tenon that let the opening exit on the front side.  Voila:

The result?  A pipe that was never intended to pass a pipecleaner... will now pass a pipecleaner, from bit to bowl!

It looks a bit odd up close, but it does the job nicely, and I've found over the years that this technique opens up a lot of shape curvatures and drilling angles that were previously unworkable.  Now when I post this pipe for sale, again, it will be the best of both worlds - A beautiful, professionally cleaned and waxed example of my early carving style with the bowl in untouched original form, and a modern, better-cut stem coupled with a much improved airhole connection.  Most people never get the chance to go back and make something from their past better, so I find myself oddly grateful to have had this run through our workshop once again, after all these years.

Talbert Halloween Pipes, Rebooted

So, it's October and for the first time in a few years, I'm making Halloween pipes for open sale.  It's been a long and strange road to get here, and I want to explain just how and why I'm "re-imagining" my Halloween pipes.

I first made them 12 years ago, and at the time I was just getting started in the business and trying all sorts of ideas to see what worked and what didn't.  I had a fantastic time making them and was very proud of what I'd done, but after a few years of putting them out every Halloween and studying the costs of the things versus their labor hours, I came to the unavoidable conclusion that they were simply a deadly loss to make - Not one of them came close to covering the time investment of making them.  And so, for a very long period that covered most of the mid-2000's, the Talbert Halloween pipes went away.

Now they are back, and back in earnest.  I wasn't happy with not making them anymore because they're the most enjoyable pipes I produce.  But, they had to turn a living wage the same as anything else I make, so in the end I decided to do two things - A) Charge the prices for them that I needed to get in order to continue making them, and B) let out all the stops.  Literally, go all-out and stop worrying about how much time one is taking, how much money I can get for it, etc, and just make the most awesomely nightmarish, hideously detailed, and all-around excellent Halloween pipes that I could.  I believe this will more than justify their prices.  Again, they're an experiment now just as much as they were when I first created them - If the market won't bear it, this may be the end of them.  But, if they do sell, there will be more... and more.  I am fully prepared to work on Halloween pipes year-round, as the inspiration strikes, and the new Halloween pipe page on our site could become a permanent fixture, if this little project is a success.

Towards this goal, this first 2012 Halloween pipe is a good bit more detailed than past Halloweens, and offers up a unique and creative internal system as well.  I've had a new stamp made solely for the Halloween pipes... No more with just an "H" stamped after the Talbert logo.  From here on, the new Halloween stamping is this:

The new Talbert Halloween pipes will offer higher craftsmanship, higher value, and (I hope) a higher and more creative artistic sensibility drawn from my ten years of pipemaking experience since the last time I carved any of these beasties for website sales.    I hope you'll enjoy the new pipes, and wish me luck in this venture.  And now, on with the show!

Experiment in Smoke, Part 3 - The Pipe

So, today I sit myself down to write the last part of my article series on this pipe.  Please pardon me if I ramble a bit, as I was up late last night for our regular Sunday night "Twitter and a Movie", a recurring internet get-together where various friends and I all queue up a streaming Netflix movie to watch and comment on (Last night we managed to survive 1960's Dinosaurus!, a stop-motion mashup of Land of the Lost and Gilligan's Island that included a dinosaur fight and a caveman in a dress).  The pipe just shipped out to its new owner and since it won't be appearing on the website, I thought I'd post the final photos of it to conclude this "Making of" story.  To say I'm pleased is an understatement - It's rare that a project goes so perfectly from initial rough sketch to final design.

The quality of the briar helped a lot, of course, but for this pipe the briar was really secondary to the overall design.  I love tackling projects where I'm not entirely sure what the outcome will be - Doing it because it's interesting and enjoyable and intriguing, not because you hope it will sell or be a big hit.  To recap my original goal, what I wanted here was nothing less than a re-imagining of the concept of the Calabash pipe - Something that was modern and dynamic, yet still classical and functional enough to equal the smoking qualities of its design forbears.  To do this, I used a hollow meerschaum expansion chamber fitted into the interior of the lower wood section, where the smoke could expand, cool, condense, and provide a lighter, less biting flavor to the taste.  Here's the fitted stem and decorative mortise that caps off the interior chamber:

While it isn't the sort of pipe one is ever going to clench due to size and weight, I did try hard to give it a substantial bowl size (One of my chief complaints with Calabashes in general is that the bowl chambers tend to be so small because of the need to fit them into the outer shell with bottom drainage).  The only technically challenging parts of the construction were the measurements of the internal bits - Turning the meerschaum chamber, cutting to length, fitting the briar mortise and brass ring, etc.  Usually I don't keep specific notes on individual pipes since I try not to repeat myself a lot in Talbert Briars, but this is one example where I intend to write out detailed step-by-step archive instructions, complete with drill bit sizes and all measurements, for reference in case I ever make another of these things.  That, of course, will depend on demand, though if spare time permits, one day I'd like to do one of these for myself.  I have a mania for collecting different "pipe philosophies" - Clays, briars, meers, expansion chamber pipes, Kiseru, etc - and this is just the sort of bizarre and unusual creation I like to have for smoking comparison.

Experiment in Smoke, Part 2

Here is the continuation from the first part of this story.  To recap, I've been thinking about an expansion chamber design that would be a modern, more exotic variation on the traditional calabash.  My last post brought me up to the stage of designing an African meerschaum insert for the lower body of the pipe, which was made from aged Holly.  The meerschaum insert separates the smoke from the Holly and provides an absorbent chamber where the smoke can expand and condense.  The entire mortise insert section took some planning, and resulted in a three part assembly of meerschaum chamber, briar mortise (To be stained to match the upper bowl), and brass surround ring to guard against cracking.

With that assembled, it was time to turn the stem.  Normally I prefer Delrin as tenon material, but this needed to be a one-piece design so off to the lathe:

Probably the hardest thing about this project was trying to keep the order of assembly straight in my head, since it was a nest of things that various bits that could cause all sorts of headaches if they were fixed in place too early or too late.  I picked a swirled, milky acrylic to serve as the spacer between briar bowl and Holly lower body, and began the shaping of the thing in earnest.  I knew going in that any pipes like this were going to carry a high price tag due to the hefty labor involvement - It's basically like making two regular pipes.

Here it is roughed out and ready for fine-tuning, with the turned stem rod test-fitted.  Not the most elegant thing to view at this point!

The Holly lower section polished up beautifully, with a subtle grain ring pattern that complimented the shape without being very obvious.  My goal was to create the same sort of visual balance as a traditional calabash, with the lower bowl section being of a near-uniform color while the upper briar bowl would be stained to really make it pop, as seen below:

The contrast stain on the briar bowl is going to show off some really beautiful bird's-eye on top - It's just a nice piece of briar all-around.

It's in the final stages now, with just detailing remaining.  Below you can see a process shot of stem work, where I'm using adhesive-backed sandpaper to sand flat the internal V of the bit.



This pipe took a lot of draw-testing.  With the airflow going through so many bends and curves and twists, it would have been very easy for it to feel constricted and tight, and I was keen to be sure that it was still an easy, smooth draw when all was said and done.  It's laid out well for long-term cleaning - A straight bit can be twisted down into the airhole in the briar bowl bottom to ream the air passage between bowl and expansion chamber, and the bottom of the mortise is large and open to allow Q-Tip (or pipecleaner) cleaning of the expansion chamber.  All this comes from my general dislike of fancy pipe designs that have smoke-crippling problems built in, especially pipes that don't allow airhole reaming as the years go by.

And so, here we are after a week's worth of work - The pic below shows the pipe nearly completed but for the final polishing and stem bending.  As I type this, it is fully finished and sitting in the cabinet with several others waiting for the next website update.  Which is going to be sizable, by the way...  I realize it's been some time since the last update, but it's usually fairly pointless to post new pipes in the week before the Chicago show, so I've been working hard to try and finish a little something for every page on our site.  If all goes well, I should have a couple of new Talberts, a new Goblin, some new LBs, and even a new tamper and some jewelry by Emily to post this week.  Fingers crossed!