How to make smoking pipes with your own hands: a step-by-step description. How To Make Smoking Pipes Best Material For Smoking Pipe

Making truly quality pipes is a painstaking process involving many steps. Today's story is dedicated to the making of pipes by master Alexander Bondarev.

Like many masters, Alexander is self-taught: he looked at other people's work, noticed something, tried to do something himself, improved something and it took root in the work. I will not go into technical details, I will not dwell in detail on any individual processes. Alexander himself has all this in his blog, he talks in detail about the processes and pitfalls and does it skillfully and with pictures.

Well, I'll go through the common places, sketch, so to speak, a sketch.

Tubes are made from many materials, from clay and stone to corncob and pumpkin. Although, wood is still considered a traditional material. There are also many options here: cherry, pear, beech, but the best pipes are made from briar. Briar pipes are also called heather pipes.

Briar is an outgrowth in the rhizome of heather, which grows in the difficult conditions of the stony soil of the Mediterranean. This growth serves as a tree to accumulate water, and together with water it absorbs minerals into itself, becoming very durable and refractory. It is these properties that make briar an ideal pipe material.

Briar is harvested specifically for tubers. It is cleaned, washed, dried. Correct drying gives the right wood properties and taste. If it is not dried properly, cracks will appear, and if it is not dried it will not taste good. But the latter is fixable, briar can also ripen in the form of a finished product.

The workpiece is fixed in the machine two times. For the first time, the shank is turned (this is what meets the mouthpiece), and secondly, the bowl itself with the tobacco chamber. Moreover, if a ring is used on the tube to decorate the junction with the mouthpiece, and it is most often used in good pipes, then it is installed directly on the machine, followed by drilling the mortise, the mouthpiece landing site. If you put the ring separately, you get microscopic cracks at the joints, and this is unacceptable.

Rings are most often made from various types of wood, horn, bone, or precious metals. For example, products made from natural horn and ivory cannot be exported to the United States, they protect nature there. So you have to replace these parts with acrylic.

Alexander has a reason to be proud: one and a half kilogram "piece" of mammoth tusk. Its owner lived a long time ago on the territory of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, then died, and then Soviet scientists found the horn. And then Alexander found scientists :)

We continue rough processing of the tube blank. The excess is mercilessly cut off. No labor protection and safety precautions :)

Rough grinding on the wheel. At the upper end of the shank, you can see the very decorative ring, though not from the same mammoth, but from boxwood.

And here is an unpleasant surprise. A small cavity in the solid wood spoils the whole picture. Most likely, the cavern will not be able to grind off and this pipe will no longer become smooth, but will be rusted. Harder with cracks. When they are found, the workpiece is most often ejected. But this is a valuable wood material, mammoth or bone, and even a few hours of work.

Also, blanks with cavities inside the tobacco chamber remain without a future. In principle, if the cavity is small, then after several months of smoking it will not be found, but such a pipe cannot be sold, the reputation of the master will suffer.

A very important stage is the drilling of the smoke channel. First, the channel is drilled to the point of meeting with the tobacco camera, and then the camera is selected. Moreover, the channel should exit exactly at the bottom of the camera. If the bottom of the chamber is lower than the outlet of the channel, the pipe will not smoke to the end, which will lead to stagnation of resin and an unpleasant taste and smell.

Approximately five hours have passed since the start of work, and we have made only a blank. If they cut spoons, they would call them a thumbs-up. Then the creative process of shaping begins. Done manually, the time taken is highly dependent on the shape of the tube. On average, one pipe takes three to four full working days.

We will not abuse the host's hospitality, so let's go back to the finished pipe.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. The mouthpieces are the same. They are also made from various materials, but now ebonite or acrylic is considered traditional. Alexander uses warm lamp ebonite. A hole is drilled in the cylinder for the channel and the trunnion, which will go into the wooden part of the tube. There, too, an accuracy of up to 0.2 millimeters per thermal gap is required.

After grinding, the tube is treated with ordinary stains, ground again, if necessary, treated with stains again and ground again.

Tubes are not friendly with varnishes, only polishing.

Alternating sanding with painting, you can achieve a spectacular pattern of wood fibers, grains.

The final touch is the seal of the master.

Each pipe is marked with the name of the master, the date of birth of the pipe and its quality. Each pipe maker has his own scale and he evaluates the pipes at his discretion.

Each tube comes with a leather case. It is sewn right there with the same hands.

And here are the tubes. I like smooth rounded shapes more, while others will like rustered ones more. There are generally similar to hemp :)

“No, you don’t take it off, these are my working pipes and, in general, there’s a mess here and you don’t need to do that” :) A master can afford such a creative mess. There are no pipes made for oneself, rather, these are pipes with a small defect identified at the final stages. Such a marriage does not affect any properties, except for aesthetic indicators, but this cannot be given to the customer either.

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Many would agree that smoking has become commonplace in our daily lives. Nowadays it is fashionable to smoke vapes, hookahs, cigarettes, bongos, and some still prefer to plunge into the atmosphere of the past with the help of a smoking pipe. In this article, we will talk about what a genuine smoking pipe is, we will figure out what this accessory for smoking is made of, and we will try to determine which device from the past is worth giving preference to a real gentleman.

What is a smoking pipe

A smoking pipe is a special device designed for smoking tobacco, which is pre-prepared and cut. It was the smoking pipe that was the very accessory with the help of which all of humanity became addicted to the addiction. This type of smoking was very popular almost until the middle of the 20th century, when it was replaced by cigarettes and cigarettes. And although at present this method of smoking is not very popular, European wood smoking pipes still find their true connoisseurs, and are popular in narrow aristocratic circles of society.

Hookah is the eastern modification of the smoking pipe. Only it has a more complex device and is intended for smoking not dry tobacco, but wet tobacco and non-tobacco mixtures, smoking stones and creams.

All smoking pipes have a similar structure and consist of the following parts:

• bowl,
• camera,
• chubuk,
• mouthpiece,
• bite,
• mouthpiece neck,
• smoke channel;
• filter

Each of the parts has a specific function. But now we will not dwell on this.

Before you start smoking, you must first clean the device from burnt tobacco and dirt, and only then fill it with a new one. It would seem that a smoking pipe is a very simple device and for smoking it, apart from tobacco, nothing else is required. But this is not the case. There are many essential accessories to make the preparation process for smoking easier, as well as to take care of this device. These are various treadlers, brushes, knives, etc.

Throughout the existence of a smoking pipe, its appearance and attitude towards it have changed a lot. From a simple and cheap gimmick, it has become part of the image. And this is no longer a product of mass production with low quality, but an expensive single product, recently of author's execution. Collecting rare items is gaining popularity, communities of their connoisseurs are being created.

Materials (edit)

Anyone who wants to join the culture of pipe smoking should be aware that there are a very large number of their varieties. They are classified according to the following parameters:

• material of manufacture;
• form.

In this article, we will describe in more detail the materials from which these devices are made, and what forms there are, we will tell you next time.

Wood

Some of the most popular are wood smoking pipes. In order for them to serve well and for a long time, it is necessary to carefully approach the choice of wood from which the pipe is made. The type of wood affects not only the strength and shape of the device, but also the taste of tobacco smoke. The best wood is briar, but it doesn't come cheap either.

Briard Is a dense tree-like outgrowth between the root and trunk of a heather shrub. Mediterranean briar wood from siliceous soils is best suited. The high silicon content does not allow the pipe to burn, and the porous structure of this wood remarkably absorbs moisture that is formed during smoking. The best specimens are obtained from 80-100 summer plants.

Briar pipes are not only fire resistant. They have the ability to collect and return the flavor of the tobacco that was smoked in them. This is the taste of the tube that the device acquires during its operation. What this taste will be will depend on the quality of the wood, the quality of processing, how often the device is used and, of course, the tobacco that is smoked.

Inexpensive pipes are made from pear or beech. Other wood is less suitable, and conifers are not at all suitable for this purpose. Cheap pipes can be from a variety of fruit trees, birch or beech, but are not worth buying. Since they burn out when smoked, giving the smoke an unpleasant aftertaste, and moisture collects and flows out of the mouthpiece along with tar and ash.

Sometimes you can find smokers pipes made of mortar- bog oak that has lain for centuries in peat or clay soil. Such wood is very durable and well suited for such devices. But since the stocks of this material are not large, morta is not used for industrial production.

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Meerschaum

An excellent material for smoking pipes is foam (Meerschaum). The word Meerschaum is translated from German as "sea foam" and well characterizes such qualities as lightness and whiteness. Foam is called sepiolite - it is a porous white mineral, the highest quality is mined in Turkey, near the city of Eskisehir. Foam tubes have the same properties as briar tubes - they are heat-resistant, weakly heat-conducting and hygroscopic, which is very important for these devices. Due to its high moisture absorption capacity, the foam tube changes color over time from white to golden, cherry or brown. It is impossible to guess how long it will take for the device to change color - it may take 2 months and a year. To a greater extent, this will be influenced by the frequency and intensity of smoking, and to a lesser extent - by the type of tobacco.

The advantage of foam pipes over briar pipes is that the foam device can be smoked several times a day, while briar pipes must be dried after each smoking session. But products made of sepiolite are very fragile and must be handled very carefully.

Pumpkin

There is also a pumpkin smoking pipe called kalabash. Calabash is translated from English as bottle gourd or gourd. For a long time, pipes were made from pumpkin with bowls of sea foam or porcelain, but their creation is very laborious and, today, these devices are very expensive. Therefore, they use mahogany or briar to create smoking devices, giving them similar shapes, and pass them off as kalabash.

The main feature of the pumpkin tube is the presence of an air chamber, which is located below the bowl. In this chamber, the smoke is cooled and softened.

Pumpkin and foam pipes are very similar functionally, but the smoke from the calabash is much softer and cooler.

Corn

One of the inexpensive devices are maize pipes. They are made from corn cobs, which are pre-dried for about 2 years. Then they are formed into bowls, immersed in a mixture based on gypsum, and then varnished.

Corn pipes do not need to be smoked like briar pipes and can therefore be recommended for beginners as their first pipe. Of the shortcomings, it can be noted that they need to be dried for a long time, as well as their small lines of operation - they burn out in less than two years. But, since these are cheap pipes, they can simply be replaced with new ones, because in terms of taste, they are a worthy alternative to briar devices.

Other materials

Clay pipes are not popular these days for smoking, although they are durable and easy to make. In most cases, such specimens are added to private collections. The same goes for porcelain devices.

Pipe metal is used mainly for decoration or for some parts. Smoking devices with a metal bowl are not very convenient for smoking tobacco, since they heat up very much, but they can well be used for smoking drugs.

Also, recently, plastic tubes have appeared. But this is completely unsuitable material for such a device and cannot be used for its intended purpose, they can be bought as souvenirs.

We have considered only a few of the materials from which smoking pipes are made. But in pursuit of a low price, do not forget about your health. After all, the correct smoking pipe will not be cheap, but it will filter tobacco smoke of better quality and bring pleasure with the taste of your favorite tobacco.

Purchased smoking pipes cannot always satisfy all requirements, so it is better to make a unique smoking pipe with your own hands and feel like a real master. This requires the simplest materials, a little patience and imagination - and then you can get an excellent pipe with a unique and inimitable design.

Making a smoking pipe with your own hands

It is not so difficult to make a smoking pipe with your own hands using materials at hand, but its cost will be higher than the purchased one. Manufacturing will require some tools and materials, knowledge of the tube device and patience, but even so, the quality of the first copies will be low.

The structure of the tube and the name of all its parts can be easily found on the Internet, as well as a diagram of its structure. If before starting work it turned out that there were no necessary tools, then the manufacture of the mouthpiece and briar would have to be abandoned. You need to take a ready-made block and a standard acrylic mouthpiece, this will greatly facilitate the task. You can order these items in specialized online stores or on classified sites. In order for the elements to fit together along the connectors, they must be purchased from the same seller: then there is no need to sharpen the parts by adjusting them to the desired size.

In order to make a pipe for smoking, you need a minimum set of tools:

• File;
• Sanding paper of varying grain size;
• A set of drills of various diameters and lengths;
• Vice;
• Joiner's machine.

Beginner's Guide - How to smoke a pipe properly?

Working with a workpiece

To work with the workpiece, a joiner's vice is used: they increase the accuracy and quality of work. Clutching the block in a vice, they draw a pencil around the contour of the future tube. The excess is cut off with a hacksaw, but then you will have to process it with a file. Grinding the desired shape, they also use a sanding belt. This is the end of this stage. Next, a drilling machine is used to quickly and accurately make a hole in the tobacco chamber. To make a channel hole, several drills with a diameter of 3-4 mm are needed. In addition, it must be elongated - it will not be easy to find such a drill, you will have to look. Alternatively, the long drill is modified by sharpening it to a curved shape. For mortise, you need a drill with a diameter of 7-10 mm.

The drills are specially wrapped in soft material. In order not to make the hole more than necessary, the depth of the holes is measured: the drill lying at an angle should not move to the side. The edge of the briar is carefully trimmed so that the outline is perpendicular to the flue duct. It is necessary to mark the axis on the sides of the workpiece in order to maintain accuracy. Drilling begins at low speeds so as not to damage the workpiece with a heated drill.

Compliance with the calculated depth of the holes is necessary in order not to make a mistake when working with the tobacco chamber. The workpiece is removed from the vice, after which the correctness of the grooves is checked. Then the mortise is drilled: it is important to observe the marked axes. If the drill in the channel moves to the side during drilling, you can correct the axes by changing the shape of the tube. When the hole is ready, the edge of the mortise is filed with a file. After completing this step, a hole is drilled for the tobacco chamber. For this, an already prepared curved drill is used. The workpiece is removed from the vise so that you can make sure that the axes are set correctly. After that, they start working again. Drill carefully, observing the required depth so that the channel merges neatly with the bottom of the chamber. Drill the remaining depth manually for greater accuracy.

Mouthpiece

For manufacturing, you will need an ebonite bar of the required length. Most often they use imported material, since its quality is higher than domestic. Having drilled a place for the Teflon trunnion, take out the workpiece and check the correctness of the hole made. The required hole depth is clearly observed. Then connect the mouthpiece to the first blank by gluing. To do this, drip epoxy glue to the bottom of the trunnion and, without changing its position on the machine, insert the trunnion into the briar. Remove excess glue before drying.

Now you need to connect the mouthpiece to the briar by drilling a smoke channel in the first one. You need to drill consistently, gradually increasing the depth. The drills must be small in diameter to reach the end of the channel. Having reached the end of the workpiece, the drill will come out from the back side. The workpiece is now removed from the machine. Check the holes made and clean the workpiece from dust.

Mouthpiece flare

After connecting both parts of the tube, it remains to make a bell of the mouthpiece. This is the part of the tube that is held directly in the mouth, so it must be of the correct diameter and neither too narrow nor too wide. For this, a special needle is used. Carefully insert the needle into the channel and swing the workpiece until a gap of the desired diameter is formed. From this moment, the workpiece ceases to be a raw product and takes on the appearance of a real smoking pipe. To make it look really beautiful, you need to do some grinding and polishing.

After completing the main stage, carefully clean the workpiece from the remnants of glue and dust. Having carefully examined the edges of the workpiece and the shape of the tube, mark those places that need to be corrected before starting the final work.

Completion of work

Sanding paper is required for sanding. It is best to use a sanding disc. It will provide a quick and smooth sanding surface, while hand sanding will take much longer. If you use a disc, it is inserted into a drilling machine and gently greased with a special polishing paste. This will give the workpiece the desired smoothness and avoid damage during grinding.

When finished sanding the outside, you need to sand the inner holes of the tube. For processing the smoke channel, thin wooden sticks are used, tightly wrapped in fine sanding paper. No grinding paste is used in the mouthpiece, as it may remain on the channel walls.

Now the tube is almost finished and it remains to be painted to get the finished look. Stains are used to color the pipe. They are of several types: water-based, chemical and alcoholic. It is best to use alcohol or water stains. Chemicals are a mixture of chemical components that will adversely affect both the product and health. After each stage of polishing, a stain is applied: in this case, it will be absorbed and make the wood pattern more expressive. Different stains are used to give the mouthpiece and briard different colors.

When the tube is finished painting, it must be allowed to dry. Then they paint over the places that need to be given a specific color or shade. When the tube is completely dry, it is ready to use. After falling asleep and lighting tobacco, you can feel the pleasant taste of a unique homemade pipe made at home.

Making a pipe with your own hands is a long and laborious process. This will require material, tools, skills, and experimentation. As practice shows, even experienced carpenters produce the first copies of far from the best quality. What smoking pipes are made of is a whole science.

Do-it-yourself smoking pipe is made of wood. The optimum material is briar, but it is almost impossible to find it commercially. Briar is extracted from the heather root native to the Mediterranean. Therefore, as a rule, cherry or pear wood is taken as a basis - available materials for a smoking pipe.

It is worth saying that making a smoking pipe with your own hands will cost many times more than buying a new one. This is due to the laborious process of cutting out the base, preparing the material, as well as enlightening the internal channels. You will have to spoil more than one workpiece before you get some semblance of a smoking device.

Many people wonder how to make a foil tube, a bong from a bottle. This cannot be called a pipe for smoking, as plastic and artificial surfaces do not have the same effect as wood and briar.

Technology and production does not allow the use of paper products.

You can focus on pottery, rustic, but the slightest crack will make the product unusable.

Ready-made solutions

Tobacco shops sell peculiar kits that will help you understand how to make a smoking pipe with your own hands in just 5 minutes. These are the so-called hobby blocks. Usually a hobby block is made in the form of a square or rectangular wooden block. A hole has already been drilled inside for the bowl and the smoke channel.

All that remains for the user is to attach the mouthpiece. You can also buy a drip tip on the online space, and according to the sizes that the hobby blocks have.

To be honest, the hobby block is just a toy for making smoking pipes. Making a full pipe out of this is problematic. In most cases, such items are considered solely as souvenirs.

Equipment preparation

The key tool is the band saw and drilling machine. You can find a machine in a used condition for about 5000-7000 rubles. by advertisements on the Internet. We are talking about the simplest models that can be easily fixed on the kitchen table.

It is not so easy to find a band saw for making smoking pipes and the device will most likely cost more. However, if it is intended to manufacture tubes in the long term, such equipment will become indispensable.

The next element of the preparation kit is the drill. For the flue duct, models with a diameter of 4 mm are usually selected. You can find such products for machine tools in specialized stores. The best option is a furniture hinge drill, which is used to make repairs, including a wide range of options, ideal for creating a tube.

If carving is intended, art kits will be required. Carved decoration is a laborious process.

Stages of making a smoking pipe

You can learn how to make a pipe for smoking tobacco according to the following steps:

How to make a mouthpiece?

The optimal choice for a mouthpiece is ebonite. Smoking pipe material can be purchased at home improvement stores or at the same specialized tobacco stores. Before making a bong or a pipe, it is worth purchasing ebonite in reserve.

A piece of ebonite is vertically installed in a drilling machine. First, the drill creates a perpendicularly flat surface. Next, holes are made for the trunnion in accordance with the parameters of the shank.

The hardest part is drilling the smoke channel in the mouthpiece. It is important to remember that the hole must be tapered in length. Usually, drills with a diameter of no more than one and a half millimeters are selected, but in any case, exactly the drill is selected that fits the chubuk smoke channel.

To make the hole tapered, the mouthpiece is drilled with thinner drills each time and in several passes. Wooden pipes smoke better in this case.

Some people make and make pipes out of clay, paper, and other improvised means. But this is a qualitatively different technology, which is problematic to implement without skills. Pipe briarwood and ebonite are the best materials.

In contact with

As I promised, I am publishing an article on the manufacture of a smoking pipe. I shot the blank at every stage, but still my hands did not get to write the text for each photo. Huge work, as it turned out.

UPDATE !!!
The article is already well outdated, but write a new one
no time at all :) But there is a more recent video, or rather,
whole movie... It's 2015. How to find the time, be sure
I will shoot a new video, and separate videos at different stages
process. So follow the link,
subscribe to the channel:)

This is a ring from. It is prepared in advance. Sometimes you have to spend a whole working day to prepare such rings from different materials and in different sizes.

One end of the ring is ground strictly perpendicular to the axis. This side will face the bowl. The other side is not ground off - it is already ground off in place.

This is what the tusk itself looks like.

In addition to mammoth tusk, I also use other materials: cow horn, elk horn, various types of wood (I like boxwood and bubingo root), acrylic imitations of all kinds of materials. Curiously, a pipe with a mammoth tusk cannot be sent to the United States. To protect rare animals, their laws prohibit the import of ivory products, and customs officials cannot distinguish an elephant from a fossil mammoth, which is a little too late to protect. Therefore, only acrylic imitation of ivory is used on the American market.

On a lathe, I carved a cylinder at the end of the shank for the inner diameter of the ring. I glued the ring onto epoxy glue, then grinded off the end and drilled a mortise. It is very important to do this in one installation so that the axis of the mortise is exactly perpendicular to the end face. Otherwise, there would be a crack at the junction of the shank and the mouthpiece.

Precisely because the workpiece at this stage cannot be removed from the machine, rings have to be prepared in advance. The work would have been simplified by a second lathe, even the smallest one, but for now there is also more necessary equipment for which free funds are spent.

If you do not make a ring, then you can do without a lathe, having only a drilling machine. In this case, the end of the shank is sharpened with a Forstner drill. This is a cutter used for drilling for furniture hinges, for example.

The next step is to drill the smoke channel. I drill it by feeding the workpiece with my hands to a drill rotating in a lathe. Resting on the right place with the back binder, I do not let the drill go to the side.

To do this, you need to make a hole on the back of the workpiece. The center of the back cap will rest against this hole. Another hole at the bottom of the mortise - a drill will fall into it.

The smoke channel is drilled to the required depth to the proposed meeting point with the drill of the tobacco chamber.

Drill - 4mm. Drilling diameter is a moot point. Most factory manufacturers make the channels narrow, about 3 mm. Danish craftsmen prefer a little wider - 3.5 mm. Most of our craftsmen drill 4mm. American masters also love broad channels.

A pipe with a wide channel smokes, in my opinion, tastier and drier. The likelihood of tobacco particles being sucked into the channel slightly increases, but for filterless tubes this is not a problem: the channel can be easily cleaned with a brush without disassembling the tube. I myself have not encountered this problem, since I smoke mostly coarsely chopped tobaccos of the English group. Danish tobaccos are usually cut finer, which is probably why Danish masters prefer narrower channels.

The hole is drilled just below the center of the bottom of the mortise. In bents, this is necessary for the brush to easily pass the assembled tube. When grinding the channel, the hole will be slightly bored up to an oval.

For the next installation on the lathe, I drill the tobacco chamber and sharpen the cylinder of the bowl. The shape of the tube is not at all cylindrical, and will be removed by another tool, but it will have something to start from.

In the background is a drill for a tobacco chamber. This is a perk refined to a parabola.

The camera is sharpened until it converges with the smoke channel. The channel should enter the center of the chamber along the very bottom. A little more to the right or to the left is not a big problem, and within reasonable limits I make such a mistake. Slightly lower, with a groove along the bottom is not entirely correct, I try not to leave such a groove. A little higher is definitely a marriage. A pipe with an overestimated channel bore will not finish smoking until the end, it will begin to "sour", which will ruin the taste.

In this case, everything is perfect. The canal exit will be even neater after grinding.

It can be seen that the glued corners have worn off and will not become part of the tube.

The next stage is turning the shape. In the background is a velcro sanding disc. I install it on a lathe, but you can adapt any motor, or even use a grinder.

Using a lathe for this is not even entirely correct. A turner who loves his machine will never use any abrasives on it. But my machine is so old and not accurate, many generations of students of some vocational school worked on it before me.

A couple of black dots are visible in the image - these are sandpits - grains of sand that got into the briar from the ground. These sandpits will wear off, but even if they hit the surface of the tube, they are quite acceptable. Smooth tubes without sendpits are more expensive.

At first, I only sharpen the rounding of the bowl on four sides.

Then I roughly deduce the whole shape.

If you wet the workpiece, you can see grains - a natural briar pattern. Later, I will contrast these grains with successive sanding and staining.

The stammel was sanded a little more with coarse sandpaper (150 grit), a piece of ebonite was cut off for the mouthpiece.

The mouthpiece will be slightly curved, but it will be straight at first. Ebonite bends easily when heated, then hardens. But this is later.

On a lathe, I grind a trunnion - the spike of the mouthpiece for connection with the stammel - the wooden part. The trunnion has a precise diameter to fit snugly in the mortise without getting stuck. And the length is precisely adjusted to the depth of the mortise, so that there is no cavity inside the assembled pipe. To be absolutely precise, the length of the trunnion is still slightly less than the depth of the mortise, approximately 0.2 mm. This is necessary due to thermal expansion so that an alkali does not form in the warm tube.

The mouthpiece channel was drilled with three drills: first a little 3.8 mm, then 2.5 almost to the end, then 1.5 mm towards the end of the mouthpiece.

Then I bore the slit in the mouthpiece. For this, the following tools are used:

The Dremel drill attachment is used to sketch the direction of the crevice. Most of the factory manufacturers and some craftsmen (mainly Italians) stop there. But if you do everything according to your mind, you need to bore the gap with a deep cone deep into the mouthpiece. For this I use a piece of a jigsaw file.

The third tool is called a tapered rimmer. This is a triangular file with a grinded cut. In a wide area, the section fits into a circle with a diameter of 4 mm - just under the diameter of the stammel channel. By rotating this rimmer in the channel, I remove the "steps" between the drills with different drills. The result is a smooth taper from 4mm at the inlet to 1.5mm at the mouthpiece. Again, many manufacturers omit this step, and these steps accumulate condensation from the smoke.

Then I roughly sharpen the shape of the mouthpiece with the same Velcro sanding disc. Further - only hand tools: files and skins.

In this picture, the shape of the mouthpiece is roughly deduced. I do this with a flat file.

I worked a little more with a file, and then - a skin of 150 grit on just such a block. I use different blocks: round, rectangular, complex profiles. Grinding on your fingers will not work, at least because of the different density of materials: the briard will fail, the mammoth and ebonite will bulge.

I spent some more.

I got to 240 grit. Wet it. Grains are visible.

The channels of the stammel and the mouthpiece were sanded with sandpaper on a wooden skewer. From the side of the mouthpiece - with skins folded into a sharp corner. I grind the chisel canal up to 320 grit - there is no further need. The only task is to get rid of the drill marks that make cleaning difficult. I not only grind the mouthpiece channel up to 800 grit, but also polish it with a paste on a long brush (visible behind the tube).

Then I heat the mouthpiece with a construction hairdryer and fold it over. Then I cool it with cold water. While there was no hair dryer, I used a simple candle. A hairdryer is more convenient only because it is impossible to accidentally set fire to ebonite.

Sanded with 320 grit sandpaper. Determined the final shape of the mouthpiece. I make the mouthpiece physiological, like a boxing mouthpiece.

Starting at 320 grit, I paint the pipe between the skins. I currently use black water stain. After staining, I wash off the remains of the stain with a damp cloth.

Here the black painted tube is sanded to 400 grit. As you can see, some of the stain that got on the more porous fibers was absorbed a little deeper and remained after sanding. This is how the contrast of grains appears.

The procedure is repeated with sandpaper 500 and 600 grit.

I apply the main color. This is already an alcohol-soluble stain. Again, rinse off excess stain with a damp cloth to prevent the pipe from getting your hands dirty.

I polish the pipe with paste on a polishing wheel. On the polished mouthpiece, small shoals of grinding are visible - I grind it there, bring it to 1500 grit, and polish it again.

I grind the stains in the tobacco chamber with a sandpaper on such a stick. I use 150 grit coarse skin. Some masters grind the camera in the mirror, but I think this is not only superfluous, but also harmful. Soot deposits faster on the rough surface of the chamber.

I mark the tube with stamps. His name is A. Bondarev. Grading A-B-B, A - the highest. And the date of manufacture, in this case 2013-09-13. Traditionally, craftsmen use the Latin alphabet for hallmarks, but I prefer native Russian letters. Perhaps I will have to moderate my patriotism when I enter foreign markets, but so far my pipes are sold only in Russia and the CIS.

On the finished tube, I apply carnauba wax, a natural polish that gives M & Ms, for example. In fact, this is just a pre-sale preparation, since over time the carnauba will be erased. I use the same cotton pad to apply the carnauba as I did for polishing.

It remains to sew a leather bag, and the tube is ready. A drop of black stain remained in the cell - it doesn't matter. Light up. I erased most of the splashes, and you can't rub any further without distorting the geometry of the camera.