How to Carve a Wooden Pipe
Smoking wooden pipes has always given off an aura of old sophistication. Fashionable men in the olden days smoked a wooden pipe instead of rolled cigarettes. However, store-bought wooden pipes can be pretty expensive. If you want to experience the pleasure of smoking tobacco from a wooden pipe but do not want to buy an actual pipe, here are a few simple instructions for making your own pipe.
Required Materials
- A block of briar or Bruyere wood
- A ferrule, a circle and a pencil
- A small saw
- A Dremel tool
- A drill with gimlets
- A milling cutter and a chisel
- A grafter
- A piece of sandpaper
Instructions
You would need to decide what you would like your wooden pipe to look like before you start working on it. You can either draw your very own design or find the picture of a pipe that you really like. Such pictures are available in books, in magazines and on the Internet. You can even copy wooden pipes made famous by popular movie or book characters, such as Sherlock Holmes or Gandalf the Grey.
Carving the Pipe
- Cut the block of briar wood into the preliminary shape of your pipe by using your saw. Do not worry about the shape itself just yet. Just saw off a piece from the block and cut a shape that follows the basic silhouette of the bowl and part of the stem.
- At the wider end of the block, the one that would become the bowl, draw two circles. One circle should fit inside the other circle. These two circles form the outline of the hollow of your pipe bowl.
- On the narrower end of the block, draw a narrow slot. This should serve as the mouthpiece of the pipe.
- Using a drill, cut a hole outlining the circles and slots you have drawn on both ends of the pipe. Ideally, the walls of the bowl of your wooden pipe should have a thickness of 8mm while the depth of the bowl is 18mm. The hole for the mouthpiece should be 7mm deep. However, all these measurements are entirely dependent on the wooden pipe design you have drawn.
- Chisel the edges of the pipe bowl as well as the inside of the bowl to make it appear smoother and rounder. Cut away at the curves as well to give the wooden pipe its final shape as you have drawn it to be.
- To finish the pipe, smooth its entire surface with sandpaper to take out the roughness of the wood. Afterwards, use a sealant finish and then polish it with lacquer.
Tips
Some pipe smokers claim that the kind of wood used to make the pipe can make a difference in the taste of the tobacco that is being smoked. To test this, you can try using other types of wood aside from briar or Bruyere wood.