pipemakersforum.com

Has anyone tried using Mountain Laurel for pipemaking?

This might well be in Robert's, aka datstinkinkat's, sphere of knowledge.

I'm not sure if this wood has been mentioned yet as an alternative, but a couple of interesting articles linked to Pipedia drew my attention. Doing a comparison on Wikipedia, I noticed the plant is from the same family as Briar & Manzanita, i.e. Ericaceae.

These two articles are what caught my attention:
http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/451597.html
http://www.woodmagazine.com/wood/story. ... ta/317.xml

There was a guy named Jerry Perry at Richmond, 2004 who had a bunch of mountain laurel pipes he had made. I think he sold a quite a few of them.

Rad

Apparently there was a company called Breezewood that made mountain laurel pipes, I'm guessing around the same time when others were using manzanita, circa WWII.

But according to Wikipedia: "All parts of the plant are poisonous." And this website says mountain laurel is "dangerously poisonous" and that "honey, when made by bees in the area where mountain laurel is grown, has been found to be poisonous."

So I'm gonna have to pass on mountain laurel, I think.