next two - 11-15 and 11-16

[Jos]

Hi there,

here come the next two:

11-15






13 cm / 5.1" long, weight 65 g / 2.3 oz. Ebonite stem, no filter.

11-16






14 cm / 5.5" long, weight 37 g / 1.3 oz. Acrylic stem, 9mm filter.

Critique, please ...

Regards, Jens

[taharris]

Nice.

I particularly like the Billiard.

[wdteipen]

I really like the stem work on the volcano. The grain isn't so good and the stummel shaping could use some refining so that it is more crisp. The plateaux on the bottom is very bland also and might have been better removed and sanded smooth. I think you did decent with a bad block but it would be better if it were sandblasted or rusticated.

The billiard is nice. The only thing I see is that the thickness of the shank is a bit too big for the size of the bowl throwing the proportions of a touch. Otherwise it looks pretty good to me.

[Sasquatch]

I'm going to agree with WT on most points - the volcano is a bit fudgy or amorphous, and looks all the moreso because the stem is all hard edges and angles. I don't find them complimentary in that way, but the basic proportions I think are good.

I really hate to see those fissures though. I'm not of the "it's natural so it's okay" crowd. Those look shitty and I would either keep filing, rusticate, or throw the thing away - I'm not kidding. Briar with big long cracks like that? Where's the next crack? 1 mm behind the wall of the chamber? You better hope not.


The billiard's basic proportions are, I think, okay, but what's not okay is that the top of the bowl is way skinnier than the bottom, and with the height of the thing, it gets a kind of strange look - not quite a brandy, but not really a sharply cut billiard. If you took a lot more material off the bottom, rounded it off and made the thickest part of the pipe somewhere approaching the middle, I think it would bloom into full billiard-hood, and then a guy could make a judgment about whether the shank is too heavy or not. As it is, the shank looks heavy because the bottom of the pipe is heavy.