Want to show you work to the world? Want a place to post photos of your work and solicit the opinions of those that have gone before you? Post your work here.
The grain on this block of wood is one of the nicest I've worked with! It had flame to straight grain 360 degrees... The top of the bowl is rusticated per the customers request.
drat! I knew I took too few pictures... I'm at work and the pipe is scheduled to go out today. I'll have to try and catch my wife and ask her to snap a shot. If she can do it (she hates my digital camera) I'll post it on here tonight.
random wrote:Ben, when you're staining the top, especially a plateaux top... well, I use a Q-tip to apply the stain and <i>let gravity help</i> keep it out of the bowl. If you just hold the bowl upright you'll have a mess. Another nice thing about using a Q-tip is it has two ends... if you get too much on someplace and it starts looking all runny and crap, just flip the Q-top end-for-end and wipe away the excess.
Thanks. Not sure why I never thought of doing it upside down!
It's actualy not a plateaux top. Just hand rusticted with my 'lil chizels. It may look a little smooth cause I played around with melting some carnuba onto it...
Another thing you can do is stain the burl before you drill it. You can even finish the top with shellaq at this point (if that's something you do.) Then just chuck it up and drill away. Since you're never touching the burl with anything, you end up with a perfectly finished top and no stain anywhere it shouldn't be.
Nice pipe buddy!!! Way cool! And awesome tip Todd, thanks! I was staining a pipe this weekend, upside down and still got stain in the chamber. Nothing a bit of sandpaper won't fix though.
