Ode to Briar

[Archer]

A love hate thing...

"Oh Briar, how do we love thee, thy Birdseye, thy tight beautiful...(whoa thats getting dirty) grain, the density and ability to take abuse and unskilled hands...thy expense is overwhelming...so we must turn to our other mistresses..."

Anyway (yeah that was stupid, but Hornsbys and sawdust make me crazy....)

I was practicing tonight...couldn't stand watching the VOLS suck anymore than they already did, but they pulled worthlessness off beautifully...

So I went to the garage and grabbed a hunk of beech wood I had set aside from a mountain trip with my son and his papaw.

I know this pipe has more flaws and rookie errors than you can shake a stick at, but I'm gonna highlight the positives.

The shape is getting better, from all the reading I'm doing here and thanks to some great examples by some highly skilled folks here, I'm slowly training my eye to the more classical shape. Is it dead on? Hell no. Do I care, sorta, and no...no because we all will get better with time.

I love the color. In person it has a shimmery candy apple red look to it...if it wasn't such a POS I would call it my Christmas pipe.

I love the depth of the bowl. It may be hard to tell but that bowl is almost a tallboy!!

It smells like that beech gum you get at the gas station...I forget what its called...

I called it ode to briar because it cracked at the shank when I was buffing it...

Anybody know if you can smoke beechwood? I'm not gonna try it unless somebody says its OK, but it is what it is...practice pipe...if its smoke able, then its "shop pipe"...

Good smoking dudes...







Heres the fun...

Cracked shank:


Stain leeching through the porosity of the wood into the bowl:

[Sasquatch]

That's why we use briar.


The shank would look better, match the bowl better, if it had a little less taper, especially the top side. Seems almost to be on a different angle than the stem.

There are sources for fairly inexpensive briar. Some is okay, some is... garbage.

[billiard]

I like the color of it, pretty cool.

Now make another

[Archer]

That's why we use briar.


The shank would look better, match the bowl better, if it had a little less taper, especially the top side. Seems almost to be on a different angle than the stem.

There are sources for fairly inexpensive briar. Some is okay, some is... garbage.

I guess because I knew it was a free piece of wood and not briar I was a little less careful. I have another pic that shows that coming off the top of the shank its pretty straight on...the off part is really the bottom of the shank/stem transition IMO. The bowl doesn't dip below the shank or stem at all, as a matter of fact, there is a curve but the bottom of the curve is at the tenon/mortise junction...it looks like a half smile...if that makes sense. I shaped the shank to the stem, but its almost as if the shank has been drilled at an angle, which is odd because I marked it all out and centered it on the lathe like always...who knows.

I just ordered one of those four briar packs off eBay...not from Zavvos, somebody else, so we'll see how that turns out, if its crap or not! The ones I ordered had the sizes marked on the sides of the blocks,which made it easier for me to make that choice.

Thanks Sas, Bill!