Thoughts de-jour
As mentioned earlier in this blog, I didn't want to create a blog simply to have a place to post photographs. I wanted rather to write of my thoughts and feelings about the craft.
Comments from people like Gunnar, who fancy themselves to be great artists and businessmen, could of course simply be rejected during comment moderation. Probably that would be a wise alternative. I have however always tried to favor virtue over expediency, for good or ill.
This morning I will shrug aside some concerns and simply write my thoughts.
First, the fallacy that pipe engineering is mysterious. That is a joke. Pipe engineering is relatively simple. The principles used in shaping a good tobacco chamber are identical to the principles used by NASA in designing rocket exhaust nozzles. Air is a liquid, it has the same properties as water. The properties most often ignored by pipe makers are viscosity and surface tension. They also forget that airflow at high velocities is not the same as airflow at low velocities, any more than waterflow at high velocities is the same as waterflow at low velocities. Normally drilled pipes contain an intersection where the airway meets the tobacco chamber which consists of sharp edges. That is just stupid.
The airway of a pipe begins at the rim and ends at the smoke outlet, and a proper airway is a single continuous tube that of necessity changes in configuration as it bends. Makers of musical instruments have understood basic airflow principles for hundreds of years, yet makers of pipes cling to the traditions of their teachers and propagate the myth that pipe engineering is mysterious by using what in general amounts to bad engineering. Pipes made with bad engineering slapped out by the hundreds will occasionally produce a decent smoker, thus propagating the myth that it is mysterious. It is not in the least mysterious.
However, producing a good tobacco chamber is costly, thus unprofitable. The profit motive is, for some, everything.
There are two methods of producing quality.
The common method is to produce quantity, then sort it according to the luck of the results. Make a dozen pipes in a day, sort them according to how each happened to turn out, and price them accordingly. Eventually the overall level of quality will rise with the practice level of the factory worker.
The other method is to produce quality at every step. This method is costly in terms of time, which as we all have been told, is money. Eventually the speed of the practitioner will increase, but if perfection is a consideration the time saved will be used to root out and address finer and finer imperfections.
The market for quality is a small one to begin with. Few people really care, if it looks like it was made in a factory that is good enough. Moderns generally have no real concept of what handcrafted means or what to do with it.
Beyond that, modern distribution and marketing methodologies come into effect. In general, price is doubled at every level. That is called "keystone" pricing. Pipes that you buy from a retailer will generally cost twice what the maker received for them. I do not have any retailers who are actively marketing my work, in part because they wish nothing to do with a radical such as me, and in part because I consider the concept of keystone pricing to be an abomination.
Today I should probably decide what to do with the Belge stummel. Should I spend a week turning it into the best smooth pipe I can make, knowing that the tobacco chamber is off by twenty thousandths of an inch, or should I spend a day turning it into a Blackwood knowing that it will outsmoke 99.99% of all pipes on the world market, or should I simply let it sit there knowing that my time would probably result in a product that sits unwanted in any case?
Yesterday I smoked the Blackwood, #89. All my pipes seem to smoke the same. The stem feels like the test stems that I made before offering the first Blackwood.
Finances make it increasingly difficult to ignore them and create beauty for its own sake. To choose the next briar block and begin the process of turning it into the best pipe I can make from it is at conflict with basic survival. There needs to be at least some expectation that after putting all the effort into a thing of beauty, someone will find it desireable enough to purchase. I have just about lost that expectation.
Comments from people like Gunnar, who fancy themselves to be great artists and businessmen, could of course simply be rejected during comment moderation. Probably that would be a wise alternative. I have however always tried to favor virtue over expediency, for good or ill.
This morning I will shrug aside some concerns and simply write my thoughts.
First, the fallacy that pipe engineering is mysterious. That is a joke. Pipe engineering is relatively simple. The principles used in shaping a good tobacco chamber are identical to the principles used by NASA in designing rocket exhaust nozzles. Air is a liquid, it has the same properties as water. The properties most often ignored by pipe makers are viscosity and surface tension. They also forget that airflow at high velocities is not the same as airflow at low velocities, any more than waterflow at high velocities is the same as waterflow at low velocities. Normally drilled pipes contain an intersection where the airway meets the tobacco chamber which consists of sharp edges. That is just stupid.
The airway of a pipe begins at the rim and ends at the smoke outlet, and a proper airway is a single continuous tube that of necessity changes in configuration as it bends. Makers of musical instruments have understood basic airflow principles for hundreds of years, yet makers of pipes cling to the traditions of their teachers and propagate the myth that pipe engineering is mysterious by using what in general amounts to bad engineering. Pipes made with bad engineering slapped out by the hundreds will occasionally produce a decent smoker, thus propagating the myth that it is mysterious. It is not in the least mysterious.
However, producing a good tobacco chamber is costly, thus unprofitable. The profit motive is, for some, everything.
There are two methods of producing quality.
The common method is to produce quantity, then sort it according to the luck of the results. Make a dozen pipes in a day, sort them according to how each happened to turn out, and price them accordingly. Eventually the overall level of quality will rise with the practice level of the factory worker.
The other method is to produce quality at every step. This method is costly in terms of time, which as we all have been told, is money. Eventually the speed of the practitioner will increase, but if perfection is a consideration the time saved will be used to root out and address finer and finer imperfections.
The market for quality is a small one to begin with. Few people really care, if it looks like it was made in a factory that is good enough. Moderns generally have no real concept of what handcrafted means or what to do with it.
Beyond that, modern distribution and marketing methodologies come into effect. In general, price is doubled at every level. That is called "keystone" pricing. Pipes that you buy from a retailer will generally cost twice what the maker received for them. I do not have any retailers who are actively marketing my work, in part because they wish nothing to do with a radical such as me, and in part because I consider the concept of keystone pricing to be an abomination.
Today I should probably decide what to do with the Belge stummel. Should I spend a week turning it into the best smooth pipe I can make, knowing that the tobacco chamber is off by twenty thousandths of an inch, or should I spend a day turning it into a Blackwood knowing that it will outsmoke 99.99% of all pipes on the world market, or should I simply let it sit there knowing that my time would probably result in a product that sits unwanted in any case?
Yesterday I smoked the Blackwood, #89. All my pipes seem to smoke the same. The stem feels like the test stems that I made before offering the first Blackwood.
Finances make it increasingly difficult to ignore them and create beauty for its own sake. To choose the next briar block and begin the process of turning it into the best pipe I can make from it is at conflict with basic survival. There needs to be at least some expectation that after putting all the effort into a thing of beauty, someone will find it desireable enough to purchase. I have just about lost that expectation.
posted by random at 5:47 AM
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