That Shiny Stuff

No pipe pic this time - Since the subject of today's blog is the mythology of pipe finishes, I was spurred to find a picture of "something shiny", and thought I'd take the opportunity to post a shot of some of Emily's jewelry. She mades both earrings and other bits, often with our pipe materals - These earrings are hand-shaped from briar slices, for instance!

For those folks who are not on our email list, I posted some new pipes last night. I've finished up the Moebius Bolus shapes I was working on, and they're all posted now. Two of the three have already sold! Alas, my favorite of the three remains, probably because I made the fatal mistake of using the word "cute" in its description. In addition, there is a very, very unusual freehand smooth posted. It has been a pet project for some time, a personal bit of attempted artwork done in tribute to US pipemaker Joe Mariner. It will also probably sit here unsold forever because A) it is weird, B) it is expensive, and C) all the collectors who would ordinarily snap it up are saving all their cash for Chicago next month. But at least I'll get to fondle it for a while before I have to let it go...

My topic for the day was inspired by a thread on Smoker's Forums started by pipemaker Stephen Downie. It is an interesting discussion of finishes, and I wanted to weigh in with (I hope) some useful info since discussions of pipe finishes so often end up being regurgitations of the same old mythology over and over again... ie, "Only carnuba wax is permitted", "Shellac and lacquer are evil incarnate", etc. Without further ado, I am pasting in the entirety of my reply in their discussion, beginning with some info on shellac:

FWIW, shellac is not a problem innately. Tons of high grade pipes are shellacked, as well as being finished with polymers, oils, varnishes, and lacquers, and they smoke and continue to smoke just fine despite all the mythology surrounding the issue. Unfortunately, there is a definite sort of, "OMG Teh pipe has sh3llak!!" attitude that just keeps going round and round no matter how much the facts say otherwise. Some random thoughts-

Talk about "natural" and "lacquer" finishes is mostly nonsense. Carnuba is natural, shellac is natural - it's an all-natural product that we can even eat if we really want to, just like any number of other lacquer & varnish finishes. The widespread perception that every finish but carnuba is some sort of non-breathing acrylic polymerized glaze is just incorrect.

Shellac can be good or bad. If applied too thickly, it can bubble during hot smoking because of the heat. It can also soften. Applied in thin coats and allowed to dry properly between coats, there is literally no one who could tell the difference in the smoke of a shellacked pipe and a non-shellacked pipe in terms of smoking experience. That said, shellac itself varies. There are various kinds, each with different tints and also different "flavors" - which is to say, the smell of the finish that is given off when it is heated. Some finishes have a distinct scent of their own, and this subtle smell can color one's experience of a tobacco's flavor because it mixes together in our olfactory experience. The bad buzz about shellac is primarily due to experiences with shellac that has been either applied too thickly, not allowed to dry properly, was too old (it does have shelf life), or was of a lower quality type that carried a noticeable scent signature.

Shellac is not, however, the finish of choice among a lot of serious factory pipes and artisans, because it isn't as durable through heat cycles as varnishes (natural oils mixed with resin and drying elements). For an example, I have a fantastic high grade Italian sandblast sitting here in front of me now. It is not finished with carnuba or shellac - the finish is a lower gloss than shellac, and it is much more even (Shellac penetrates wood and thus produces an uneven finish as a gloss. It's actually used more often as a sanding sealer). I don't know personally what this finish is, but my guess (based on the surface gloss, evenness, and the fact that the finish sits on the surface rather than being in it) is that it is a type of varnish. Does the pipe smoke hot and "not breathe" because of this? Not at all - It is a terrific smoker. Again, it isn't the mere presence of a finish that causes problems, it is more often the use of lower quality finishes and (most commonly of all, I'd guess) mistakes in the application of these finishes that produce annoyance down the line.

There are some practical reasons to be cautious of surface glosses - application of an even, non-penetrating finish such as lacquer produces an even reflective surface, and as such it is often used to effectively hide fills on middle-range pipes because it conceals their different reflective quality from the surrounding wood. Also, again, any finish applied too thickly (or worse, applied before the underlying layer was fully dried) can bubble and haze during use.

I've often heard guys demand, sometimes angrily, just why anyone uses these finishes - They "prefer their pipes natural, with only carnuba wax!" The buyers have only themselves to blame for this - It's rather like politics, where we get exactly the government that we vote for. Put a typical pipe out with only a carnuba finish and lookers will be disappointed. It won't have the high shine of the high grades, and after less than a day of casual handling the gloss will be gone and it will be a dull pipe. People aren't attracted to dull pipes - the same guy that thinks he only wants a carnuba-waxed pipe is going to pass you by (because your pipes look dull) for the next table where all the expensive pipes are shiny. I know a lot of high grade pipemakers and I can say that I can't easily think of *anyone* I know who only finishes by waxing - but one doesn't hear too many tales of their Nordhs smoking bad because they "can't breathe" The fact is, there really aren't any fully sealing finishes unless one gets into stuff like marine varnish or acrylics that attempt to link into a solid chain on the molecular level. Shellac or oil varnishes will "breathe" just as well as carnuba....the problem is using the right ones, instead of finishing your pipes with some sort of MinWax stuff that's going to smell horrible when heated.

I know of at least a couple major brands that even shellac the interiors of their bowl chambers, instead of leaving them bare or using precarbonizing. One of the funnier encounters I've had was with a guy who was proudly displaying an uncoated pipe he'd bought, and saying how he only bought pipes without "that black stuff" in the bowl.... totally unaware that his pristine "uncoated" bowl interior was actually gloss-finished with shellac! I wonder which he'd have preferred to smoke, natural carbon or natural bug excrement.....

In any event, pipe finishing is a complicated issue and a lot of what gets passed around is pretty much mythology. I'd recommend "Understanding Wood Finishing" by Bob Flexner, as a good starter book on the subject. Coincidentally, Jim Cook recommends this very same book in his pipemaking video on the Chicago Show's educational website!

Defining the Breaking Point

I've been slow to update our blogs lately because "busy" doesn't define our lives at the moment. Emily's parents may be coming to visit and between that and trying to tie up several different bits of business (plus tax time, of course), I haven't had much spare time to write. However, I've had this particular project sitting here unfinished for a couple of weeks and I thought it would be worth a comment.

As I mentioned in the description of the Moebius Bolus, one nice thing about not doing the Halloween pipes as a specific seasonal set this year is that I'm essentially free to do really weird pipes whenever the mood hits me, instead of having to save them all up for October. My recent adventures in Urban Dead have put zombies on my mind, and I thought it would be fun to do a zombie pipe. I jotted out a simple sketch of this thing and got to work.

With every pipe, there are flaws. Fluff about "using only flawless briar" is just that - advertising. The trick is to carve the flaws out of the pipe so that when you're done, the exposed surface area is as flawless as possible. One can never know what is inside the wood. Educated guesses can sometimes be made by observing the character and number of flaws that turn up during carving (I have sometimes discarded potentially viable blocks simply because they evidenced what I felt were too many flaws during shaping, and I judged that even if I could achieve a semi-flawless surface, the odds were too high that the pipe would be compromised by an internal & unseen defect). However, even then, there is no way to know. I recently saw a regrettable thread in a German forum where a pipemaker was accused of using "rotten" briar because a high grade pipe had cracked and, in the process, revealed an internal fault via a shank split. The fact is, there is no way to tell what's in the wood - The pipemaker doesn't know if there is a fissure or problem inside the material, and he won't find out until he ends up refunding someone's purchase money when an invisible defect makes itself known via an obvious problem.

The "breaking point" in today's title is that point where the pipemaker must make the decision to abandon a pipe-in-progress or not. It essentially means losing a lot of working hours to zero pay. The more working hours invested in a pipe, the higher the tension becomes, and the greater the need to find ways of working around a flaw... which is sometimes dangerous, because one can spend further hours trying to make an untenable situation work, and still end up with a pipe for the trash can. It's a challenging question of nerves - Do I keep working and see if I can get around this problem, or do I cut my losses now and get on to something else?

This was the nightmare factor in the Halloween pipes, especially. Shaping a billiard involves an hour or so of labor, maximum. You can get the shape where you want it, and if there are any serious problems, the pipe can be discarded without a serious loss of working time. This is the case with most popular classical shapes. A good repeatable shape is "time friendly", which is to say, it is easy and quick to get the design rough-shaped, in order to see if the wood has any problems, before one invests the much longer working hours into finishing the pipe (In terms of ratios, I can often get a pipe shaped and drilled in an hour, but it will then take six to ten hours to do all the finishing work - sanding, blasting, drilling and shaping a stem, etc). Carved pipes and elaborate designs are the ultimate in non time-friendly work - You put hours and hours into a complex shape only to find a fissure or fault, and suddenly have to radically change or discard the pipe. Making pipes like the Grendel and the Mountains of Madness was worse in stress than in the actual work, because I never knew when I might find some disastrous fault that could derail the entire piece and force me to abandon a week's solid work.

Today's photo is a case in point. As can be seen in the sketch, the original idea was for a full head, with a domed skull to allow a decent-sized bowl even though a large portion of the briar block could not be used for "chamber area" due to being the hanging lower jaw. I made good progress in the carving, got the bowl drilled and airhole centered, and had begun to rough-shape the face when I hit my problem. There was a large flaw in the "forehead" of the skull. I shaped inwards but it didn't go away, and ultimately I had to completely grind off the upper portion of the skull to remove the flaw. The lower section seems to be flawless so far, but I am now faced with a quandary built on two basic questions:

A) What are the odds of continuing the work further and finding another flaw? Do I keep on carving on the likelihood that this was the only flaw in the wood, so as not to lose the hours I have already invested in the pipe, or do I abandon it here and deal with having worked for a solid day without pay?

B) Removing the upper part of the skull has drastically shortened the bowl to something about the size of a Group 3-4. People who buy expensive pipes tend to want a lot of "bowl" for their money, and I've found it's very hard to sell costly pipes with smaller bowls... often just using the word "small" in a pipe description can be the kiss of death. And, with this pipe, the carving work isn't any less with the bowl being smaller - I still have quite a long way to go before the shaping is finished. In the end, I'd mostly likely be producing a 800 € Group 3 pipe.... Not the easiest thing to sell!

Thus, the breaking point becomes that time when a pipe is a question of probability - the odds of flaws versus the potential price of the pipe versus the potential likelihood of the pipe actually selling. If I'm looking at a ring-grain sandblasted billiard, I can safely guess that the chance of finding a problematic flaw during finishing is minor, say 5%. The price will be upper-middling, so it's worth finishing, and the likelihood of a sale is virtually 100% because it is a popular shape. With this skull, the odds of finding a flaw jump, which is bad. The potential price will be high, which can offset the risk, but the probability of sale is middling at best, so that pulls things back down. And that, in a nutshell, is the Breaking Point. If any of our visitors ask why I have this perfectly-drilled, half-finished, small-bowled skull sitting in the rejects bin, I can point them at this blog entry!

Moebius Bolus, or, Things to Come

During the years I was making the Halloween pipes, I was occasionally overheard to say that if I had my choice, I would simply make Halloween pipes all year and drop the conventional shape work altogether, but the problem was the financial obstacle - If one is going to sell one's entire yearly production in October, one has to be able to pay bills for the year preceeding this somehow. I don't actually think I'd abandon all classical shapes, as they are fun to make in limited doses, but I have begun edging closer to this dream in 2006, starting with such modest creations as the new Moebius Bolus shape pictured here.

This pipe is now posted for sale, along with another sandblast, on our Sandblasts page. Also there is the re-listed virgin-finish Bulldog #1 - The sale on this pipe fell through so I have reposted it to the catalog.

As can be seen in the preview pic above, the Moebius is the first in a series. I intend to make more of this shape, varying the design from pipe to pipe and shuffling details around as I work with it. Actually, one of the unfinished pipes was made entirely by Emily. I was looking for a shape idea that would be creative and identifiably "me" while also being repeatable in a way that some of the Halloween pipes simply weren't, and the idea for this design sprang from one of my personal favorite Halloween pipes, the Dhole. I did a page of sketches or variations on the idea, and kept coming back to intersections in space - I wanted a combination, even a synthesis, of the wriggling organic design of the Dhole and various "worms" and "snails" I'd made in the past, coupled with an Escher-esque overlaying of objects in space. There's probably a subtle astrological self-commentary there, too, of my Scorpio nature - the sign that will sting itself to death if it can't find something else to grapple with. I was keen to have portions of the design intersect in a recursive way, while trying to steer far clear of the Eltang-esque "bamboo rod that passes through the bowl and out the front side" look (And I do not mean this in any way to sound critical of Tom's pipes, because they are awesome - I just didn't want to get folded into that "genre") Of course, at the end of the day it's just a cute little curly pipe...

In years past, I would have had this idea and cursed because it was an obviously perfect Halloween pipe, but that meant that I had to either A) do the work now and not get paid for six months, or B) put the idea on hold until September and deal with it getting stale in the process. Ideas are like milk - they have a definite expiration date, after which the initial enthusiasm is gone and the project becomes just so much work, usually to the detriment of the finished result. Fortunately, with no Halloween pipes this year, I was free to simply hand-sign this as a Signature grade and pop it up right now, fresh off the press. I am hoping we'll be able to finish the other two next week, and more can be made as demand warrants. Sadly, I think all three of these are going to be blasts, which is a shame, sort of... I think the design would look very good as a smooth finish, but I also know that the amount of sanding required to get all the detailing smooth would push the price to the 1K mark or beyond.

On another subject, I was pleased to see that my previous post on the reasons vendors often don't involve themselves on public forums generated a lot of good debate. Better still, the vast majority of the responses were both understanding and supportive. This makes me happy, because it tells me that I'm achieving one of my aims with this blog, which is to write an ongoing account of the perspective of a "pipe professional" that treats its readers as adults - I have taken the risk of saying some controversial things based on the implicit understanding that the majority of my readers are responsible, sane grown-ups who aren't going to fly off into hissy fits on any perceived slight, and it seems to be paying off in the form of consistently increasing readership. If this is going to be interesting to read, it simply can't read like a press clipping - everything can't be bright and shiny and soulless and carefully preened of anything that might-god-forbid-offend anybody anywhere. So, I suppose an occasional rant will be a part of the mix. As long as I don't turn into the pipe world's answer to John Dvorak, I'll be happy.