Today s work consists of a series of billiards for the Philadelphia Pipe Club. They have asked me to do a club pipe for them this year. They want a small straight billiard no longer than 5 1/2 ". Using those parameters I came up with 5 shapes to give them a variety of shapes to choose for their club pipe. Below is my correspondence with Ira Stone who is leading the project.
I had a blast today, thanx for the project ! I had my own personal seminar on billiards using your parameters as a basis. I came up with 5 shapes. Some are not all that different. From the top pipes one & two are exactly the same size, only the top pipe tilts foward a few degrees and has a beveled top. In the second pipe , the bowl and shank axis are perpendicular and it has a flat top. These are my interpretations of a standard billiard but it gives you some choice.
The third pipe, is one I d like to smoke right now !. It has a rake of 4 degrees with no curvette at the top as all the other billiards in this series do. Also it has an oval shank with a cumberland ferrule and steck lucite bit.
The fourth one is a chubby or tubby billiard. About the same height as 1 & 2 , a larger bowl dia. but lots of round curves. Not everybody but a shape I like.
The 5 th is a saddle billiard, a bit taller and thinner than 1 & 2; little less rake, 3 degrees as opposed to 4 on the others. Kind of reminds me of a Dunhill I ve seen somewhere. For those who like a real lite weight pipe this is a good one.
I m going to try to get Curt to blast these so I can ship to you before your meeting. I think it would be best if they were all the same finish so no one woul d get distracted by grain and concentrate on shape.
I ve got half a mind to expand this into a 10-12 shape series ; expanding the parameters a bit and offering them all for permanent sale and then possibly expand it into other classic shapes. Good basic pipe making exercises for me and maybe it would appeal to pipe smokers too. Thanx I really had a good time with this and if you need more samples or want to mix and match different parts of the pipes that would be ok too. The only thing their might be a slight price difference on the pipe with the cunberland as that material is so expensive.
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