That e-Smoke Thing

I hope to put together a report on the CORPS show soon, but at the moment I'm still waiting for a couple of photos to come in. We stupidly forgot to take our camera and thus have no record of our weekend, other than some vague drunken memories of Jeff Folloder dancing in the fountain in fishnet stockings. In the meantime, lacking photographic evidence, I want to write a few comments about an odd new phenomenon, the e-pipe and e-cig. Here are mine:

 

These two unusual devices in the picture above are for smoking - Yes, smoking, but not of tobacco nor any other combustible weed.  They're e-smokes, part of a new wave of high tech toys that allow us to enjoy smoking in more places and without the health cautions of tobacco.  In the background is my Janty eGo, a sort of electronic cigarette/cigar that's simple, extremely convenient, and very reliable.  In the foreground is my DSE601 epipe, a more familiar but less likable device.  Both work just like pipes - You put them to the mouth, puff, and enjoy flavorful smoke, but that's where the similarity ends.  Here's a look at their insides:

The bowl of the pipe contains a rechargeable battery.  In the base of the shank is a tiny atomizer, which heats up when called to by a flow switch in the bowl that detects puffing.  Cartridges filled with mesh insert into the shank, much like a 9mm filter, and seat down onto the atomizer.  One buys blended flavors in liquid form from a variety of micro-blenders, just like in the pipe tobacco world, and drips droplets of these liquids into the cartridge mesh until it's soaked.  Then, the atomizer does its magic and the liquid becomes flavored vapor - Not smoke - that is enjoyed by the smoker.  The Janty is similar.  The long black part on the left is the battery section, then on the right we have the small brass atomizer and the mouthpiece components.

There is currently a great deal of media hype about these devices, with stories ranging from, "The cigarette smoker's solution!" to, "OMG! DANGER DANGER THEY WILL KILL YOU!"  In reality, the reputable blenders use FDA-approved flavoring ingredients in their FDA-approved liquid bases, which produce nothing but already-declared-safe vapor mist, the same you will get from fog machines.  It is true that you can put any liquid in there that you want to, and fry your brain smoking drain cleaner if you like, but you can do the same thing with any product from the local pharmacy, so the media scare tactics about the "dangers" of these devices are pretty facile.  


So what are they like?  In my opinion, pretty enjoyable.  I do not expect them to replace cigarettes or cigars or pipes, but I do think they are a handy alternative hobby/toy to enjoy in many circumstances where a briar pipe would be inconvenient.  I can drop the Janty into a shirt pocket without setting myself on fire, and pop it out to smoke for a few minutes without any need for filling, lighting, etc.  No ashes to deal with.  In fact, no by-products at all - The vapor mist dissipates quickly and usually leaves behind only a minimal scent of whatever flavoring you were enjoying (At the CORPS show, I smoked an aromatic banana-caramel-waffle blend, and our end of the table smelled like sweet breakfast food all weekend).  


I give the Janty much higher marks than the epipe, which is a very tepid piece of work.  It worked wonderfully in the beginning, but performance has degraded sharply with use, and I'm told that they tend to stop working after a month or two if used heavily.  The atomizers in the devices must be replaced periodically, because they wear out, but engineering is key here - The Janty atomizer is easily replaced for $9 and mine thus far shows no sign of wear, whereas the epipe's atomizer replacement costs $40 (!!).  When my epipe gives up the ghost, I do not intend to replace it, but I think my Janty is going to become a permanent part of my smoking hobby.  It's just my personal opinion, but I believe that Janty may well become the Dunhill of the e-smoke market.


This has run a bit longer than intended, so I'll sign off here for now.  If anyone has specific questions, let me know via comments or email, and I'll do my best to answer them in my next post on this subject, where I'll also talk a little about the various flavors, blends, DIY possibilities, and the very likely potential that there may be a handmade Talbert epipe in the future, done to my standards and aesthetics. 

Sandblasting again!

Well, after a month of no sandblasting, our company's new compressor has arrived and we just finished setting it up today.  This is going to be a technical blog post, at least somewhat, so if you're not interested in workshop equipment, this is a good place to tune out. 


After a lot of looking and shopping, we settled on this beastie, a BelAire "Quiet Performance" 7.5HP, 80 gallon, 2 stage model with a lot of bells and whistles.  The most obvious is the top cowling, which fully surrounds the motor and pump with sound insulating lining while including an extra air recirculating fan to keep everything inside cool and ensure good ventilation.  This was an experiment for me, but I'm glad we chose it, since I've now run it with the cowling on and off, and the difference is noticeable - With the cowling in place, we can walk outside our garage and the compressor running at full tilt cannot be heard over the sound of the window AC unit.  So, it should keep the neighbors happy.  It's still loud in the garage, but at least now it shouldn't drown out my headphone audiobooks.

This one has some extras I haven't had before, including a low level oil shutoff and an automatic tank drain - Something to make any pipemaker happy!  It also has a triple pass aftercooler that lowers the temperature of air compressed into the tank (rated at 175psi), to cut down on the amount of moisture present in hotter air.   And an oil filter the size of a Coke bottle...


The bit that I already dearly love, however, is this:

 Quite expensive in itself (It was more than all the usual filter/regulator combos you see at hardware stores), it's a precision dial pressure regulator that's extremely accurate.  Any pipemaker who has spent some years cursing and wrestling with those spring-top knob regulators, that you have to crank and crank and crank, and which are typically pretty vague on their actual pressure, would be delighted by this - I've barely used the system and it's worth the money already to me.  The dial is smooth and pressure drop-offs when dialing it down are nearly instant, and actually stop where you set the pressure.  It's going to make it a lot easier for me to change operating pressures to better match with different medias and different blasting needs.



I tried it out immediately, of course.  Here's the first test piece, a junk block that I had set aside due to way too many flaws.  The surface texture on here was achieved in about five minutes of blasting.  I'm hoping this will seriously increase our output, and have the first Ligne Bretagne bulldog blast lined up for finishing tonight.  With luck, I'll have it and maybe another couple ready to post in the next catalog update, which will be happening in a day or two.

Here comes Halloween

Image via Wikipedia

What a difference a month can make! As I write this, I am launching into full-time work on this year's Halloween pipes, which will probably take all my time for the next two months. It's a great way to work and enjoy the season, because I get my Halloween vibe stretched out for two solid months, instead of just October. I'm only doing a few pipes this year, don't have time for more, and am instead going to focus on making the best three or four pipes that I can, instead of trying to do a whole set.
This year's theme, as I mentioned elsewhere, is "Classical Pipes gone Mad" - Something that's probably my favorite style of pipe to do, anyway. I'm getting to this late, but this year has been nuts, and our August was full of surprises... Not least of which is that we finally took some time off, our first semi-vacation since 2001 (We didn't actually go anywhere, just collapsed here and didn't go into the workshop for a while). This coincided with finally getting the last of our French officialdom entanglements DE-tangled, so we splurged a bit by getting a Netflix subscription and just being lazy for a little while.  We've added some much-needed tools to the workshop, and tomorrow sees the final big addition to our work here with the arrival of a more powerful sandblasting compressor.  It's going to be very nice indeed to be back in the sandblasting business!
Here are a few Halloween pipe sketches so far:

This one's for a request for a billiard or Zulu derivation. The one up top was actually the last idea sketched, but it's my favorite by far.  I rejected several of these for being too similar to pipes I'd made before - I hate repeating myself. The "insane blowfish" project is actually progressing much worse. Oddly, it's easy to take a recognizable classical shape and twist it into bizarre proportions and have it remain recognizable, but blowfish vary so crazily all over the appearance spectrum that making anything that is obviously a blowfish "gone wrong" is proving more difficult than I expected. Might have to wait till the next full moon for proper inspiration on this one...