We can rebuild him

Another trip down memory lane with another 1998 pipe donation needing some work.  This pipe, which I informally dubbed the Marlowe after a certain PI, was one of the most difficult things I'd tried at the time, though looking at it now it's a terribly clunky thing -

To my credit, or excuse, it was my first attempt at a "classical" shape and done without a lathe.  This is a crucial point in understanding the thing.  While it may look a bit wobbly and thick, it was not smoothly cut while spinning solidly on a benchtop lathe... It was shaped by hand files while spinning on friction mounts chucked in my hand drill which was strapped to my workbench with screw clamps.  And this while sitting in an unconditioned garage in the evenings after an 8 hour workday.  The bowl "ring" looks terrible because I was too afraid of my wobbly mount flying off to try to cut deep into the wood! In a lot of ways, even though it doesn't look good, I'm happy it came out as well as it did considering the tools I was working with.  I'm particularly proud of the band fit I achieved - A silver band applied jeweler-style with heat expansion, which has held on perfectly through the last 21 years of use:

When it came back here, however, I couldn't leave it as it was.  For one, the stem was so loose it was falling out so that HAD to be addressed, plus I just couldn't bring myself to sell it again looking as lumpy as it did.

Where the heck to begin, though?  The constraints of the shape meant there wasn't a lot to work with, so no wholesale redesign was possible.  Instead, I adopted a point-by-point approach, fixing each individual issue first before taking an overall appraisal of the result.  First up - The primitive bowl ring was redone as a double ring surrounding a hand-rusticated center ring:

That served the dual purpose of fixing the original ring and also giving the bowl more visual "weight" to help balance that overly large shank.  Next up was tightening the shank-to-bowl join for a more polished and professional appearance:

All this detailing, however, could not get around the pipe's underlying visual issue, that the bowl was too small for the shank.  And this was an f-stop problem, because I couldn't "add more bowl" and the shank could not be made smaller without removing and almost certainly destroying the original valuable silver band.  In the end, I opted for a two-pronged approach - Giving the shank a VERY subtle taper inwards as it moved from band to bowl, and giving the bowl a beveled front edge.  That seemed potentially risky as it was removing mass from an already-too-small bowl, BUT... that mass was rounded and clumsy and adding some edges and detail would, I hoped, give the bowl enough extra visual weight and detail that it would offset the lost mass.  And voila:

 

"You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" - It's a truth of life.  But, if you try hard and think about it a lot and put way more work into it than it deserves, you can sometimes turn a lost cause into a minor win with enough stubborn determination.

The problem now is... What the heck do I DO with it?  It has far more labor time in it than it's worth, given that in the end it's a 21 year old 1998 estate pipe restoration.  Also, annoyingly, I have gotten very fond of the thing.  It was a hard fought project both originally and in its "v2.0" recreation, and I can't help but think it would be an excellent pipe to add to my own collection.  I have little enough of my own work as it is, so maybe...

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.

Meet the Gnomes!

Back when we were readying to leave Brittany to return to the US, we had to choose what we brought and what we left behind.  We brought all of our morta stock, all of our briar stock, and roughly 20,000 rough-turned Ligne Bretagne stummels in medium and larger sizes.  What we left behind, however, were entire crates of tiny stummels... Group 1-sized billiards and others.

I opted to leave most of the smallest bowls behind because they cost shipping money and were commercially unmarketable.  Despite the fact that tiny pipes take as much labor as larger ones, buyers tend to equate size with value and when they see a very small pipe, they expect an equally small price.  That puts the maker in the difficult position of either slapping together a cheap pipe at very high speed, one whose craftsmanship would reflect badly on the rest of his offerings ("I bought one of X's $45 pipes and it was really poorly done, why would I ever spend three times the price for one of the others?") or of taking a big financial risk by producing a lot of very well-done tiny pipes that would be costly for their size, and might very possibly sit unsold for weeks, months, or years.

Recently, however, two events came together perfectly here.  First, we created the Ligne Bretagne Classic - A line of standardized designs that could be made to order here in our shop, thus negating the financial risk of carrying a lot of inventory that might or might not sell.  Secondly, my wife came in the other day from the garage holding a bag of small turned bowls.  She'd been digging in some long-unopened boxes of briar for something else, and found a bag of small bowls that we'd decided to bring along with us just for fun.

At that point we both realized... We don't have to gamble on making a bunch of tiny pipes that might not sell.  We can make them to order, just like the LB Classics.  That way, fans who want a tiny pipe can get one, and I don't have to risk sitting on hundreds of dollars of stock if they're not popular.

Then, of course, the idea of GNOMES hit me, and that was that, a whole new pipe series for Ligne Bretagne!  The bag of bowls that Emily found contained roughed shapes that could be turned into 24 sandblasts and a couple of smooths - The usual ratio for any pipes not being spackled with putty.  But... We've got plenty of other smaller bowls that don't get used a lot, just because they're smaller than normal and people already complain that Ligne Bretagnes tend towards the smaller size range.  Grouping them all into the new "Gnomes" category seemed like a grand idea - Fun for me to do, fun for the specific buyers who wanted small pipes, and no risk for production time or sales.

Et voila, a new stamp marking was born: 

We've already got a great big florid "G" for Goblins, so the new mark is suitably small and focused, instead.

Pricing was the next big decision.  "Slap 'em together" and sell them for $40-50, scratches and stem gaps and all, or "Do them right" for twice the price because of the labor time?

It took about two microseconds to realize this was no choice at all, because I'm incapable of just leaving flaws that bug me - I'd end up sitting and tweaking and detailing regardless.

So, with that in mind, I'm pricing and crafting them for what they are - High-quality, high-detailed little jewels.  Airways are tapered and coned, bits are filed thin and comfortable, buttons are reshaped and thinned, bit slots are internally fanned for smooth airflow, bowls are magnifier-inspected to be scratch-free, and there's enough labor time built into the pricing to allow for some fun.  In these first ones, that fun equals two-toned finishes, with natural rims that fade down into rich brown bowl stains. 

So how small ARE the Gnomes?  Small enough to easily fit into a shirt pocket, to easily fall into the 10-20 gram weight range, and to be so light as to be effortless clenchers.  But, they're still big enough for a decent smoke - I'm not into making Kiseru, here.  To wit:

So that's the Gnomes!  The guiding principles:

Keep them small.
Make them quality.
Make them sprightly.
Make them fun.
Make them creative.
Keep them featherweight.

Making an Offset Airhole Work

Click images to enlarge.

Frenzy

Note - Of the pipes previewed in this post, both Ligne Bretagnes are now sold, and so is the morta poker. The two remaining mortas will be posted on our website catalog in a day or two.

Quiet time on the Talbert Pipes website and blog does not equal relaxation time for us. Unfortunately. It seems like a very long time since I last had the chance to update the site or blogs, but the workshop has been humming. It's odd, too, given the global recession this year, that our sales should be improving. It almost seems that we've run about six months to a year ahead of the news media-induced "state of the economy" - That is to say, we first noticed an inexplicable drop-off in business in the Fall of 2007, long before news channels were squawking about the economic disaster round the clock, and the sluggish sales continued through a good chunk of 2008. Now that the media has finally realized there is a business crisis on hand, our business has picked back up a good bit. This is not to say that we're in any danger of becoming wealthy any time soon, but at least we can afford to buy food now, which is a great improvement!

The three morta pipes above were all just finished recently, but I haven't had time to post them to the catalog yet. I'm actually trying to decide what to do with them, whether to sell them direct or send them to a dealer, as we have a couple of dealers with orders in-house now. If anyone wants one, feel free to email me for info - prices are as always, 209 € for the sandblast or 229 € ea for the smooths, plus VAT and shipping if applicable. I'm particularly fond of the "fat prince" in the middle - It has an extra-thick bowl shape that is very broad and round, with a beveled rim instead of a flat one. The sandblast poker was done for an order and may or may not be sold, I haven't heard back yet.

In other news, I finished the two Ligne Bretagne billiards that were treated with the process I described in a previous post. Both came out smooth, and quite nice:






Again, here are two pipes that I have not yet decided what to do with. I'd rather sell them direct than send them to a dealer, because I want to be able to get direct feedback on their smoking quality due to their special treatment, but I just haven't had the spare time to stick the pics together and post them as catalog entries. If anyone is interested in either of them (The first two pics are of the "gold root" one with a strong grain contrast stain, and the third pic is of the other pipe, in red-orange with a marbled white stem accent band), just let me know. Despite a greater amount of labor time going into them, these treated pipes are the same price as normal Ligne Bretagnes for now - 123 € each, plus VAT and shipping as needed. Note that I have yet to develop a cutesy marketing phrase for this process, nor any special marking, so for the time being they are indistinguishable from normal LBs.