Jumbo Charatan gets the Hot Rod treatment

[LatakiaLover]

Lately I'm been having fun taking "stock" pipes---meaning the way the factory made them---and altering things to improve their performance and appearance. I think of it as "hot rodding" in the same way Detroit-made cars were modified by their owners to look and run better back in the 1950s through the 1980s. (I guess it's still done to some extent, but computerized everything largely killed off America's backyard Hot Rod Culture.)

Anyway, last year I made a replacement stem for a large Charatan Supreme, and the other day came across a nearly identical junker in a box that I realized was made by the same guy. This one was a lower grade (Special), and had a slightly shallower shank-to-bowl angle, but that's it. The stem, being both extremely distinctive and poisonously ugly, was absolutely for sure made by the same guy.

So. I slenderized the overly chunky bowl and shank, opened the airway, topped the hammered-to-shit rim about 1.5mm, made a new "compression" style Lucite stem for it (meaning the airway tapers over its entire length), shaped the button to my liking, and refinished it all with a simple "virgin-style" hard wax finish.

Why? Because it seemed like the thing to do, of course. The older I get the more I appreciate big bowls/long smokes, and this thing fills the bill. A smidge short of 2" deep chamber that's 7/8" across.

71 grams, 6.5" long.

NOTE --- The last photo is the Supreme from last year "trimmed" the same amount that this Special was, and also to show the WTF stem.

.

[Sasquatch]

Any idea why so many of those pipes have that "stepped" tenon? It never made much sense to me and certainly smokes worse than your "standard" treatment here.

[UnderShade]

Vast improvement...

[n80]

Several of the older 'before' examples you have shown us feature stems that are bent almost at an angle. Was that a style or just poor bending? It looks like someone heated it up, jabbed a thumb about halfway up and pulled the tip down......you know, the way I would do it.

If it was a style thing, I never liked it and your take is a better looking stem but that makes a better looking pipe.

[LatakiaLover]

Any idea why so many of those pipes have that "stepped" tenon? It never made much sense to me and certainly smokes worse than your "standard" treatment here.

The same question got answered a while back on a different forum by Ken Barnes Jr. who used to MANAGE the Charatan shop, so you'd think that would be the end of it, right?:




...but the video he pointed to just shows a guy cutting the tenon & step with a hand tool, wood-lathe-style (!?). No cage chuck in sight (whatever that might be).

My best guess? Some sort of "condenser" notion. The rubber version of an aluminum thingy thought to hang in space and "collect" moisture.

[LatakiaLover]

Several of the older 'before' examples you have shown us feature stems that are bent almost at an angle. Was that a style or just poor bending? It looks like someone heated it up, jabbed a thumb about halfway up and pulled the tip down......you know, the way I would do it.

If it was a style thing, I never liked it and your take is a better looking stem but that makes a better looking pipe.

Charatan was all about The Wood, and stems were dealt with as a necessary evil.

They did passably well with standard sizes, but when the stummels got past a certain size the only way to keep the time required to complete a pipe within acceptable limits was to taper the shank and slap on a short & quick, low effort stem.

[wdteipen]

beautiful work as usual, George. When I see tenons like this I wonder if they were trying to manage moisture kinda like a stinger. Just gives moisture somewhere to go other than up the airway and into your mouth. If that's true, the weird thing to me is why it's necessary if you make a pipe right you don't have to make whirlygigs to compensate for bad engineering.