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...

Logo Change

I don't know if anyone has noticed, but the logo up top has changed - The "Talbert" part of the script is different.  Improved, too, in my opinion at least.  This is a classic example of the domino effect in action...  Make one change somewhere and suddenly it echoes through a dozen related pieces of work.  I spent yesterday working in Photoshop to come up with a stamp design for our new pipe bags, discussed here.  This brought up all sorts of problems, because the logo we had been using on our website and business cards was too complex for a good embossed stamp (Too many wiggly lines):

I pretty much had to toss that one together last year just after arriving back in the states, solely so we would have something to put on our business cards for the 2009 CORPS show.  I was tolerably OK with it but never fully pleased, as I felt it was too comic book-ish, and not serious enough for a line of very high end pipes.  It worked better as a website header than as an actual portable logo, for use on other things like promo materials and such, and was especially bad for making a bag stamp from.  Knowing that this logo would have to be radically altered to make a decent leather stamp, I had to choose between either changing it explicitly for the stamp, coming up with a totally different logo just for the bags, or coming up with a new logo that the bags and website could share.  I experimented with alterations of the above design but was never able to produce anything that I didn't feel looked too comical - Indeed, translating that logo to a black and white stamp gave it an entirely undesirable "Flintstones" vibe. 

After a lot of thought and comparisons of different ideas, Em and I decided to go all-out, and make a new logo for the bags that would be backwards-transportable to the website and all our promo stuff.  Some time later, and after LOTS of logo and font comparisons, we settled on our new pipe bag stamping:

I arrived at this after a great deal of "trimming down" - I tried out ideas with "Pipes" included, pics, circles, warps, etc.  The bag stamping very nearly became Talbert Pipes, but in the end I felt that putting the "Pipes" in there was superflouous on a leather bag that a pipe would ship in... If you bought it, you would know full well what was in it.  Using just the brand name makes for a simpler stamp and a stronger stamp - My hope is that this, rendered well, will look quite nice pressed into the thick green leather bags.  It was tempting to "fancy it up" with pipe pictures and such, but as any designer can tell you, the hardest thing to do is to pare something down rather than adding stuff on.  Yet, the simplest designs are usually the strongest.  I felt the scripted lettering above was ideal because it suggested artistry and creativity, yet rendered in a professional and more serious manner than the old "paint splotch" lettering. 

Once the decision was made, the logo went off to the stamping company to get the bag stamps made, and I went to work changing the graphics on this site to reflect the new logo.  I'll be changing our business cards as soon as I'm done posting this.  Some remnants of previous logos will remain, in our Cafe Press clothing items (Sure to be an instant collectible!  LOL), because I just don't have the working time now to devote to changing all that stuff yet.  Also, we'll continue using our original Talbert Pipes briar stamp for some time, but eventually I hope to have a new stamp made to match the new logo.