New Pipe Smoker With A Question? Ask an Old Fart

[Mister Moo]

Originally Posted by drevim

Here's a couple:

A question I've never heard a clear answer for....

How does one know if the pipe they have is a good "smoker"?

To elaborate, how do I know if my process is poor, or if the pipe is just not a good one. I've always heard price isn't always a tell tale sign of a good smoking pipe, as proven by ebay purchases from a number of people.

I'll have a go at your very interesting question #1, Drev's.

You know because you know, after sufficient experience. Elaboration: once you have enough experience under your belt to properly fill and burn through a bowl evenly, time after time, you will begin to notice that some pipes do parts of the process better than other.

Early on the smoker is necessarily concerned with "am I tamping too much" or "is the tobacco too wet" or "did I fill the bowl too tightly" to really grasp what the pipe is doing. Absent some reasonable amount of experience comfortably smoking tobacco "a" in a couple of pipes, it's hard to judge what one pipe does differently than another.

Once you get a handle on the fill, the even burn, the tamp and how to judge tobacco for wet/dry or rubbing of (flake) folding, etc., you will probably have a few pipes with some developing cake. Now you begin to cipher out what one pipe does differently than another with a given tobacco. In other words, and to answer part of your question: you can know your pipes AFTER you develop your process. In my view. As an old Fart.

I have a $7.00 ebay bulldog that, after cleaning and reaming etc. has only ever smoked cool, dry and gurgle-less. I have other pipes at 10x or 20x the cost that overheat quickly or were chronic gurglers without some modifications. A pipe from a highly regarded craftsman or factory will probably smoke well but there's no guarantee; a crap piece of no-name briar may smoke better than your Uncle Bob's Dunhill. Go figure.

You can bend the odds of getting a good smoking pipe by studying certain parts of pipe geometry* before you buy; and good cake makes for a generally cooler and drier piece of briar as tie passes. You can understand your pipes better after you are totally comfortable with the process.

*Always carry a little LED flashlight. Inspect the airhole position entering the bottom of the bowl looking for center-low. Blow thru the pipe and hope not to hear a whistle, some say. Measure, with a pipe cleaner, the depth of the mortise in the shank relative to the length of the tenon - it is good when they are very close to the same length/depth, thus avoiding a water/gurgle trap. Stuff like that.

This may be my clearest answer ever, btw. Happy holidays, mate.