I now understand why you guys tell us to try and master the Billiard

[Adui]

And I hate the shape...

I can carve a passably decent Author, a good Rhodesian, and a decent Bulldog. Yet the simple, classic, Billiard still eludes me. I'm beginning to wonder if i will ever make one that is worth even the cost of my materials.

I will keep trying..

[RickB]

After I posted my first non-kit pipe on here, folks told me to clear whatever else I was planning and to make some billiards, and they couldn't have been more right. I think I've done 11 or 12 at this point and still don't think I've really gotten one right - and I've made ~30 other pipes in that time and some of those have actually started looking pretty nice. Carving a billiard is really, really honest.

[seamonster]

And once you GET it, you will begin to love it. I was really really not into the shape, until I made a dozen or so, now it's all I want to smoke.....

[DocAitch]

Having begun carving way before the internet era when the Danes were huge in the late 1960s and 1970s , I basically taught myself to carve a pipe turd. I stopped with the pipe making in the late 1970s to pursue my medical career and didn't think about pipe making until 2015, when I retired.
When I stumbled onto this forum in 2015, I was a bit full of myself, and got my nose knocked out of joint when I presented a few pipes.
It took me a while to enroll in the “Make a Billiard School”, but once I had made 6-8 of them, and thought about the process ( and what I have learned about the process), I have also become a billiard enthusiast.
In any group of pipes that I start now, 30-40% of them are billiard family.
Its very basic to almost any learned skill that you have to learn the rules and how to follow them before you can begin to break them (i.e. modify them to follow your own direction).
Hang in there and accept the critiques with an open mind- if you don't understand a point, ask your question.
DocAitch

[n80]

I've made two now. Both okay...... at best. Don't really look forward to making more....but I will. The funny thing is, I like smoking them. Even the flawed ones I made. So even if I screw one up at least I get a decent shop pipe or pocket pipe.

I'm working on a poker now. Copying a Dunhill. Will hopefully make another Rhodesian before the PITH deadline and then back to a billiard or two. I'm a clencher....or what is the word...lunt?.....so in addition to trying to get the form and function right I want to try to make as light a billiard as I can too.

[RickB]

I'm a clencher....or what is the word...lunt?.....so in addition to trying to get the form and function right I want to try to make as light a billiard as I can too.

My two most smoked pipes at this point are two billiards I've done. Even if it's not as pretty, I like a short saddle stem specifically because these are primarily "work" pipes, I smoke them when I'm doing my day job on my laptop and I smoke them in the shop. Fairly thin walls and keeping them around 4.5" total gets these down to around or under an ounce, and they feel lighter than that because it's a short lever arm.

[Adui]

I've made two now. Both okay...... at best. Don't really look forward to making more....but I will. The funny thing is, I like smoking them. Even the flawed ones I made. So even if I screw one up at least I get a decent shop pipe or pocket pipe.

I'm working on a poker now. Copying a Dunhill. Will hopefully make another Rhodesian before the PITH deadline and then back to a billiard or two. I'm a clencher....or what is the word...lunt?.....so in addition to trying to get the form and function right I want to try to make as light a billiard as I can too.

My favorite pipe is a hideous attempt (IMHO) to carve a billiard that was so out of shape I rusticated it just for practice at that, and to try and hide its flaws. It sits lovingly on my rack waiting for me to smoke it again. I understand the reason, I just wish it wasn't such a frustratingly hard endeavor. For suck a classic, basic shape its been the most difficult to make...

[RickB]

I understand the reason, I just wish it wasn't such a frustratingly hard endeavor. For suck a classic, basic shape its been the most difficult to make...

Precisely. Nowhere for weak spots to hide, really - but everything you learn from holding lines, making curves look good, etc., ALL applies to any other shape you're going to try to create.

[Sasquatch]

All roads lead to Rome, baby.

As a carver, I had no appreciation for the shape, and got into pipe making with every intent to be the next Bo Nordh, only to take a step back a year or two in and try to get really "right" about a few things, and I never got back out, it's basically all I do now, I could change the name of my website to "pretty much all I make is billiards so fuck off".

Funny thing is I've seen a bunch of collectors swing the same way, having gone from the biggest, fanciest best-grained wonder-fish thing to just having a whole roll-up case full of billiards because.

I went on Al Pascia the other day, they have the "pipe finder" and if you look for a straight billiard, man there's 200 on the site. 3 look ANY good. I went on smokingpipes, same thing, found a Barling from about 1940 that looked great, so I ordered that, but everything else looked like shit - near misses.

It's worth learning, because the lessons about the curves, the geometries, the proportions.... they work on EVERYthing else.

[RickB]

Funny thing is I've seen a bunch of collectors swing the same way, having gone from the biggest, fanciest best-grained wonder-fish thing to just having a whole roll-up case full of billiards because.

I had collector tell me in no uncertain terms that he thinks most collectors eventually find a classic shape they like and then smoke/collect those almost exclusively, so I ventured a guess:
"Straight billiard?"
"Straight billiard."

Glad I learned to love them