Drilling

[Kip]

I drug this pipe out of its hangar a couple days ago after not smoking it in a *long* time. I'd forgotten how absolutely perfectly it handles a bowl of tobacco. I chalk it up to near perfect draught hole placement dead-center bottom. There are plenty of other factors, but I put much of the credit here. The bottom border of the draught hole is tangential to the bowl floor. I reliably am left with no dottle - just burned ash. It's not an expensive pipe. Just a low-mid level Peterson. No idea what they go for now (I bought this one new in 2004 and don't have any idea what they go for these days, but it's not high end by any stretch). I chipped the cake, so took the opportunity to scrape it all out and start over, thus providing a good chance to try and get a picture.

When you're looking at buying a new pipe, always check this. Physics prevents you from smoking any tobacco that lies below the draught hole.

Shank-stem drilling is also very important, but there are mods you can make to work with that. The intersection between draught and bowl is all but unfixable if it's terribly out of line vertically (You can work around slight variance with artificial floor building using ash, but not a great deal). So much so that Rainer Barbi (now deceased German master carver) was known to throw away blocks of very expensive briar if found to be 0.5 mm out of his spec.

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[Kip]

A quickie response to BHH's question in the "What's in your bowl" thread....

The most common moisture-inducing problem related to drilling is this. If the mortise is deeper than the tenon is long, a plenum (gap) is created (see blue area in the pic below). This pocket of space creates an instant, drastic low-pressure spot in the airway. Even though it's on a tiny scale, it's sudden enough to condense moisture out of the airstream. As this moisture accumulates, it runs back down the shank into the bowl. There's not a lot you can do to help this short of having a new stem made with an appropriately long tenon.

However, you can run a pipe cleaner down the stem throughout the smoke to blot up the moisture.

This is assuming all the other drilling is sound....esoecially the alignment of the airway path between shank and stem. If that's out of whack a pipe cleaner may not go all the way to the bowl. See next post for options on that front....

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[Kip]

Also problematic is this, and it is especially common on strongly bent pipes (like the exaggerated shape in the pic). Some bends are so aggressive that it's not so easy to drill a hole to connect the stem's airway to the bowl, unless you have one of those fancy flexible drill bits. So, straight lines prevail at the expense of hole alignment. If the airway from the stem is strongly offset from the airway in the shank, a pipe cleaner may not easily pass down to the bowl during a smoke (* - see note below). If you're comfortable doing it, you can take a tiny rat-tail file and try to even them up by tapering each side of the airway (shank and stem). This does run the risk of screwing up your pipe, so it's at your own risk. Think of it as "porting and polishing" your pipe - the same way you'd do the cylinder heads on your car engine.


* - NEVER take your pipe apart hot....it wears out the hole and you'll end up with a loose stem that leaks or falls apart on you. Not good.

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[BowhuntnHoosier]

As you stated I have been running a pipe cleaner down the pipe during smoking. Everything seems to line up just fine. So it might just be the length of the tenon. Not a real horrible problem just uses two or three cleaners during a bowl. Thanks for the explanation Kip. I have ordered a couple more Savinelli pipes and we will see if they have an issue probably next week. Have a great day and thanks again.

[Kip]

Here is probably a better picture of proper draught hole alignment. Notice the ovoid shape of the hole - almost ending in a point rather than an arc - owing to its meeting the bowl perfectly along its floor (the floor of both bowl & draught are on the same level). If the hole enters the bowl at the side of the chamber rather than the floor, you'll probably get a lesser experience and possibly a bad one (constant relights near the end of a bowl, and much more un burned tobacco afterward).



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