old ugly
40 Cal.
attempting to make a smoking pipe from homemade clay and fire it in the campfire. im going to make a few as im sure i will end up with breakage. we will see what happens.
Looking good do far. How are you getting the long hole through the stem?
I think Bill Ruger copied that with his lost wax investment casting process. Nothing new under the sun, right?I read something about these many years ago, but never tried to make one. I recall the Lenape Indians molded the stem of the pipe around a grass stem, which was left in place when the pipe was fired. The grass burned up and disintegrated, leaving a nice, open passage.
Let us know how these turn out!
Notchy Bob
Clay pipes with a clay stem if clamped in the teeth you get enough to bits of clay off to trigger a dirt taste with your smoke. It’s not like eating dirt but it the taste off raw veggies.
Reed stems taste like a meerschaum, no noticeable flavor. But as it gets just a little cake you get a woodsy flavor. I smoke an English blend and find it very tasty in clay.
Willow Bark, sweet grass, cedar bark and a bit of cedar ( juniper) leaf, prairie sage, and clover leaf dried and chopped fine, makes a nice kinninkinic for them what’s can’t take tobacco... but be like Bill and don’t inhale. Just a mouthfull of smoke rolled around and blown out.
I'm smoking right now as I write this and and can breath normally with a mouth full of smoke.
I beleave back in the old days, they would use a pies of straw to make the hole to draw through, and it would burn up, on firing the clay pipe. not having to pull out a stick and risk breaking it. how does one pull a stick out of a fired pipe?i just rolled a coil of clay around a long skinny stick. once the pipe is formed pull the stick out.
that is great, thanks for posting it.Those look really good, old ugly ! You do good work! It seems to me that one broken stem out of four or five pipes is not bad. the pipes you have there look great!
I believe those molded clay pipes were important trade goods. They were certainly fragile, but it is my understanding that broken pieces of stem were often used as elongated beads, in much the same way that short hairpipes and cylindrical bone beads were used. I also recall reading... somewhere... about a pipe bowl being used as a powder measure. So, even broken trade pipes could be useful.
Now, that's interesting. I gave up smoking in about 1972, or thereabouts, and I'll have to confess, I've never smoked a clay pipe. tenngun's observations regarding the effect of the stem on the flavor of the smoke is something I would not have thought about.
I want to show a picture:
View attachment 47744
This shows Lord Milton (second from left) and Dr. Walter Butler Cheadle (third from left), with their Assiniboine guide and his wife and son on their trip across Canada in 1862-1864.
Here is a detail shot from that image, enlarged:
View attachment 47745
This appears to show a clay pipe with a wooden stem added on. Maybe a repair, to make a pipe with a broken stem usable again? That seems most likely to me, but tenngun's comments suggest the wooden stem might have been added on just to make the smoke taste better!
Best regards,
Notchy Bob
I beleave back in the old days, they would use a pies of straw to make the hole to draw through, and it would burn up, on firing the clay pipe. not having to pull out a stick and risk breaking it. how does one pull a stick out of a fired pipe?
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