heat dissipater

[Duane]

I’m planning on making a pipe with ventilation holes through it and thought I’d check things out here before I ruin a briar.
As you look down on the smoke hole, I’m thinking of drilling a bunch of smaller holes in a circle around the smoke hole (except for where the air hole comes across) that go all the way through the briar. This would allow air to past upward around the smoke hole to cool it off and to keep the outside of the pipe cool.
Before I do this, I guess my question is whether air is a better heat dissipater then briar?
Thanks,
Duane

[JonBood]

Sounds like the bowl would have to be pretty thick to get enough space to facilitate those holes.
If you make them you would, at least theoretically, end up with some heat driven upward air flow that would probably cool the sides of the bowl, as well as insulating it. But on the other hand a bowl that large would probably have thick enough walls to make it quite cool anyway.

To me it would be more of a design dilemma, to make a pipe look attractive with holes big enough to induce an airflow

Best regards, Jon

[RadDavis]

Google the "Doodler" by Tracy Mincer. This is not a new idea, but it apparently works.

Rad

[Sasquatch]

Porsche Design pipes featured fins for essentially the same purpose.

[Duane]

Thanks for your help! It's interesting to know that someone has been making them. I'll have to come up with a good design to do it with. As you can notice in the "gallery" section labled "Retirement hobby", my pipe making is a bit weird, but I usually have plenty of wood to work with. I think I might try making a "real" pipe after this one! That will be much harder to do. This free hand pipe making is fun and not difficult, because no matter how it comes out...."It's Perfect!" heehee!
Thanks again!
Duane

[Duane]

Google the "Doodler" by Tracy Mincer. This is not a new idea, but it apparently works.

Rad

I looked up the "Doodler" as Rad suggested and I ran across this from: The Complete Guide to Pipes of the Early 20th Century by Phillip J. Fry
(I decided to pass on the idea....but thanks for your help and answering my question!)

In 1951 Marvin Greene, renowned artist and film producer, set out to change the face of pipe smoking in both a stylish and functional manner. He decided to employ the pipe making genius Tracy Mincer to assist in designing such a pipe. The first goal of the team was to make the pipe the coolest smoker of its time. To this end they decided to place as many air intake holes as they could around the bowl of the pipe. This was their first mistake. The holes actually served no practical purpose as they only hampered the draw without any of the cooling properties they sought. The second goal was to create a pipe that mirrored the space-crazy styles of the early 1950s. To achieve this, they carved deep rings around the outside of the bowl to mimic the rings around Saturn. While quite stylish for the time, it actually further hampered the smokability of the pipe as it created alternating cool and hot sections surrounding the bowl. Not only did this cause rampant burnout, it made it virtually impossible to correctly gauge the heat of the tobacco and further reduced the cooling of the smoke sought by the intake holes. As the project deadline approached, they realized that there was no way to save the pipe and, even worse, they were out of money for the project. While neither man wanted to have his name attached to such a horrific piece of pipe technology, they had to put it into production to cover the cost of the prototypes. They both spent the last few days of production trying desperately, and in vain, to discover a solution. As chance would have it they were assisted by Mr. Greene's son. He suggested that they market the pipe at such a price that it would only be available to the super rich. Such a person he reasoned would be unlikely to broadcast the fact that he had purchased such a horrendous, expensive item. Instead they would all speak of it as the best pipe they had ever purchased. As for the name, he said that they should name it "doodler" because it was artistic and it aptly described the pipe as no better than dog doodle. The pipe went into full production and saw record sales. Mr. Greene's son was entirely correct as to its reception and both Mr. Greene and Mr. Mincer retired a few years later as very wealthy men.

[RadDavis]

Veeeery interesting.

I Googled this and it came up as a satire. There aren't many pipe maker who retire after a few years as very wealthy men. Not from pipe making anyway.

Rad

[Sasquatch]

Okay... I was going to post this earlier, and now I think it's more appropriate.

The idea of pulling the heat "out" of a briar pipe is.... probably wrong-headed. If you made a pipe from some conductive metal, and added all kinds of cooling fins, I think what you'd find is that you had to heat the hell out of the tobacco to get it to burn. Whereas, coddled in a big nest of briar, the stuff just simmers away, with the heat reflected back to it by the insulating walls of the pipe.

Keep the heat in the bowl, let the pipe work like a thermos, and you can burn for prolonged periods with basically no "cherry". I think if you remove that insulating property of the briar, you'd find a pipe that is more difficult to smoke at the right temperature.

Just my .02 and might not be worth that.

[Duane]

Yes, that makes perfect sense. I wasn’t even thinking of things from the tobacco’s point of view. I even made this churchwarden just for the purpose of having a good smoking pipe…..Yeah, it isn’t pretty and you don’t want to go jogging with it in your mouth, but it’s one of my best smoking pipes and it’s just the opposite what I was thinking about doing. Glad I checked in here before moving on this...thanks!

http://s1320.beta.photobucket.com/user/ ... 9790749145

Duane

[Growley]

This is an interesting topic.

I'm all for new and innovations. I had a bunch of things I wanted to try when I started making pipes, kind of a "take the pipe world by storm" thinking. Now that I'm smoking more often, I see that pipe smoking has been what it has been for so long for a reason, or lots of reasons.

I think I agree with what Sas is saying. It makes sense to keep the heat up, so to speak, to keep it well lit. But cool smoking is just as much the process of smoking as it is the pipe itself, or at least it seems to be.

I'm starting to look at innovations differently now. For example, if you could get a briar pipe to smoke as cooly as a hooka, would it be more enjoyable, or would it take away from the essence of what smoking a briar pipe is? I don't know.

If you could make a pipe that never needed to rest between smokes, would it be a hit because you only had to own 1 pipe, or a failure because it's enjoyable to own several and experience different smokes in each?

I'm probably just rambling at this point....

[Ocelot55]

I've seen the design for a pipe that had a chamber below the bowl for water. Same principle as a hookah, but on a mini scale. I guess it flopped. Why am I not surprised.

[wmolaw]

I'll have to find the article, but it discusses the thermodynamic properties of smoking a pipe and notes that the flavor comes not from the burning tobacco, but from the heated tobacco surrounding the burn. If you wicked heat away, preventing the heating of the tobacco, you would diminish the flavor, it would seem.

And, as sas said, it would also make it a hell of a lot harder to smoke.

This strikes me as the same as the question, "why briar" today with all the modern materials we have? The answer being, of course, it is still the best material in which to smoke 'baccy!

[d.huber]

I've seen the design for a pipe that had a chamber below the bowl for water. Same principle as a hookah, but on a mini scale. I guess it flopped. Why am I not surprised.

I think they called those bongs. Also, I've heard tell that sales are doing quite well with that design, however outside of the tobacco smoking community.

[taharris]

I’m planning on making a pipe with ventilation holes through it and thought I’d check things out here before I ruin a briar.
As you look down on the smoke hole, I’m thinking of drilling a bunch of smaller holes in a circle around the smoke hole (except for where the air hole comes across) that go all the way through the briar. This would allow air to past upward around the smoke hole to cool it off and to keep the outside of the pipe cool.
Before I do this, I guess my question is whether air is a better heat dissipater then briar?
Thanks,
Duane

Air is, quite honestly, a lousy heat transfer medium. When trying to transfer heat using air it is important to maximize two things: flow and area. With holes through the pipe you are maximizing neither.

If you want to improve the heat transfer out of a pipe you can either install a little fan to blow air through your holes ( ) or you can increase the surface area of your pipe. It think it would be more effective to cut fins in the side of your pipe after you are done shaping i.e., several vertical or horizontal parallel slits around the circumference of the bowl.

Hope this helps.

Todd

[Duane]

Thanks Todd for your answer....I decided to give up on that idea, but I got another thought that I put up in the "General" section "Best Smoking Pipe", because it's sort of off this topic. What I figure is, as the old saying goes, "If you want to be a Master, do what the Masters do!"....and changing it a bit..."If you want to have the best smoking pipe, find out what the Masters find to be the best smoking pipes!"......but it doesn't seem to be flying! heehee!
Thanks again,
Duane