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I have about 8 hours in this Lovat. I tried my damndest to keep it symmetrical and the walls vertical. The shank flares a bit. I have to think a lathe would make this shape a bit easier to make. However, with the tools I have, I am really focusing on trying to make this one my best yet. With that being said, what can I do to crisp this up? I am currently sanding with 120 grit, so I need to get the details pounded out before moving on.
Help would be greatly appreciated. I need to take this from a bad pipe to a decent pipe if I can.
Last edited by clickklick on Fri Aug 21, 2015 9:38 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Acting like a loon in the front yard, close to the road.
Start by taking more off the end of the shank and the stem to even out the lines of the shank. The easiest way to check for straightness on the shank is to lay a straight edge against it. Do this at various points arounf the shank. Go slowly and check often until the line is straight.
Another thing, tak a bit more off the bottom of the bowl right where it meets the shank. It makes it look like the bowl sags below the line of the shank.
Start with those then take some more pictures and see where you are at.
Am I Calamity Jane or Annie Oakley??...depends on the day. www.ladybriar.com
scotties22 wrote:
Another thing, tak a bit more off the bottom of the bowl right where it meets the shank. It makes it look like the bowl sags below the line of the shank.
Tape some sandpaper to a granite counter top (or buy a single granite tile), press the pipe into it, and you can sand a flat line all the way from stem to the bowl. Easy peasy.
It looks like what you have here is basically a poker with the base removed. The cheeks and chin look off because of this. And your bowl/shank transition is also weird. Try to get a good billiard shape into your hands and see how the bottom third of the bowl is done. The widest part of a billiard-shaped bowl should be the belly, but yours is the top, which makes it look like more of a Dublin. It's hard to tell from your pictures, but the bowl should not go below the bottom line of the shank. Finally, the saddle is too sharp, and doesn't look right with it going around the sides. Unless you're doing a freehand, taper the sides of the stem or keep them straight or do a fishtail, but not this.
Anyways, I think you're heading on the right path. Keep up the good work!
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Fail early, fail often. Your success depends on it.
Got it, will try some things and post a few more pics. Thanks!
Not sure I can save the saddle besides rounding the edge a bit. I obviously need to clean up the lines on the stem and lip as well. From the overhead pictures my bowl appears a bit oval as well. I will attempt to fix the cheeks so the top doesn't overhang the bottom and hopefully it will round out the oval.
I will try the flat surface with sandpaper trick on the bottom to get the bowl and shank at the same level.
Thanks!
Acting like a loon in the front yard, close to the road.
Looking good. I would suggest a few things to refine the shape:
- round the bottom of the bowl more, the curves you have are more abrupt for a typical lovat
- narrow the top of the bowl a bit, not too much, to have a slight taper from the top to just above the top of the shank
- take a little more off of the top of the shank near where it meets the bowl, it tapers a bit there and a straighter shank is typical of a lovat
- straighten out the sides of the stem flare. They are convex right now and straight lines will match better straight lines.
Hope this helps
Anybody can become a woodworker, but only a Craftsmen can hide his mistakes!
-Walter Blodget
It's hard to make the bottom line straight without making it flat, but that's technically what you're supposed to do. Dunhill, however, doesn't necessarily follow that rule.
The top line looks like it's not quite flat. And the way you have the shank meeting the bowl on the sides looks pinched. There should be a slight curve on the sides to reflect how the shank flows into the bowl.
The billiard bowl is also not completely straight, but goes out in the middle. Otherwise, the profile lines look too rigid. I think you've still got some room to play with that, but a caliper can tell you if you're leaving enough material. I like to try leaving a quarter inch for good measure.
Finally, a minor thing. The sides of the stem go slightly outwards on your pipe here. Slightly concave or straight makes for a more comfortable bite.
Other than that, keep on going. You're on the right track to keep at this. Lots of people just give up at this point and settle for a mediocre result.
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Fail early, fail often. Your success depends on it.
I will try to work on everything above and post again. I think the stem to bowl junction is buggered and I really don't have enough material left there to make it look right as I took too much off during rough shaping.
I don't know that I agree that a lovat needs to be wider in the middle, if anything I think it should taper up to the bow rim, as J Thompson alluded to above. I don't consider a lovat and a billiard to be identical in shape, but maybe my eyes just suck.
Acting like a loon in the front yard, close to the road.
A lovat is in the billiard family. It's a billiard with a longer shank and a short saddle bit, but "lovat" is easier to say.
With all due respect (seriously, not trying to pick a fight), it's not really something that's up for debate. A lovat has the same bowl shape as a billiard. What is up for debate is how to pronounce it.
Ryan Richardson
R2 Pipes/Ryan's Luxury Goods
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"You can't convince a stupid person that what he's doing is stupid, because the stupidness inside him is telling him that it's smart"
A Lovat is a billiard with a different shank and stem......period. The shaping rules that apply to the bowl of a Billiard apply to a Lovat, Canadian, Lumberman....what-have-you. Your pipe falls into the Billiard Family, so it should have a Billiard bowl.
The Rat and I were typing at the same time
Am I Calamity Jane or Annie Oakley??...depends on the day. www.ladybriar.com
If it's not supposed to be a billiard bowl, what kind of bowl is it? At the moment, you're closest to a billiard bowl shape, so that's what I took it for. If you intended to make a long shanked saddle dublin, you'd need to take the sides of the bowl in further and leave the rim as-is. In other words, I think either this is a billiard bowl and you just haven't thought clearly enough about it.
A well-shaped billiard bowl is not cyllindrical, and it's not merely tapered towards the top (as JThompson correctly pointed out) , but also has a radius from the middle of the bottom of the bowl to the middle on the front, back, and sides of the bowl. The subtle curve and removal of the chin make for a more graceful-looking pipe. It does indeed take practice to see where the lines should be, but it's worth learning.
I struggled with this issue for a long while when I was starting out, because I thought of a billiard as basically a poker without the protruding base and the bottom edges rounded in. On this one, you need to remove some of the "chin" on the bottom of the bowl to make the bottom line less abrupt as it wraps around the bowl.
In case I am coming across strong here (and I hope I'm not), I just want to challenge you to think clearly before you make pipes. In order to make good-looking pipes, you've got to start with a clear plan of what you want the result to look like. If you're foggy on the details when you start, the result will be just as foggy. If you're struggling with details, try to make an exact copy of a factory pipe. Forcing yourself to duplicate something exactly will train your eye on what to look for.
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Fail early, fail often. Your success depends on it.
Well I hear you all. A billiard bowl. I don't own any billiards. Probably why I think a lovat looks better when it is danish inspired. So you are absolutely correct. I have no idea what a billiard is supposed to be in technical detail. I knew this which is why I'm looking for input. I will take it back to the shop and see what happens. I am going to look up detailed pics of a billiard bowl.
Thanks for continuing to help!
Acting like a loon in the front yard, close to the road.
I find it the easiest to set the profile and then work around the bowl (towards the shank on each side) and make the cheeks match the profile. If you get the profile right you always have a reference to go back to and it will make shaping a lot easier.
Am I Calamity Jane or Annie Oakley??...depends on the day. www.ladybriar.com
You could do with just a little less radius between the bowl and shank. The other thing I see is that the bottom of the bowl seems to drop below the line of the shank. Hold up a straight edge and keep taking off material until you've got a straight line from the saddle all the way to the middle of the bottom of the bowl.
Other than that, this is shaping up nicely. Studying the shape seems to have paid off for you.
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Fail early, fail often. Your success depends on it.
