Ramping the airway

[d6monk]

Hi everyone,

I was working on a pipe today and when I went to drill it I realized that if I center the draft hole in the bottom of the mortise (I'm already using a short 3/8" mortise), I would have to notch the mortise so much that the notch would show with the stem on. I know I can get around this by drilling into the mortise a little high and then ramping the airway down with a flex-shaft, but are there any other ways to do it? I have not yet had to ramp an airway and would like to try and avoid it--but with the shapes I am doing now this seems like it may be impossible if there is not some other method I am missing.

Thanks a lot!

[Sasquatch]

It depends on if the intent of the thing is that it passes a pipe cleaner. I've had customers who demanded that, and customers who don't care. On a full bent pipe, I personally feel that the thing will smoke better with no ramp and a little tweaking on the tenon shape than with a ramped airway.

If you wanna get crazy, plug the end of your tenon and redrill the last 1/2" or so on an angle, into the airway, such that the thing acts as a ramp from the centered airway in the stem to the off center airway in the stummel. I'm not saying this is easy or even smart, but if you want perfect airflow and no "dead spaces" or whatever, that's a way to do it. I'm pretty sure there's a recent thread about a similar procedure, on a Todd Johnson pipe that looked undrillable by ordinary means.

If passing a pipe cleaner is not a huge issue, just flare the end of the tenon a bit with a countersink, or even the tip of a spade bit, and open it up some, and make sure the end of the tenon isn't occluding the airway in the stummel, and it'll smoke fine.

[KurtHuhn]

Ramping an airway is perfectly acceptable, and damn near everyone does it. If you use delrin for your tenon, you can drill it at an angle so that the holes line up and make a continuous path from one end to another. I've done it both ways, but I prefer to ramp the bottom of the mortis since it's faster and less fiddly. Either way you should be able to make it pass a pipe cleaner with no problems.

[Sasquatch]

It's surprisingly easy too. I was surprised anyhow.

[Skip]

O.K. Guys, I have a question on this very subject. For years I have marveled over the ability of Claudio Cavicchi to drill full bent pipes with no ramps and average length mortises. We have sold literaly hundreds of his pipes and never have I seen one that did not pass a pipe cleaner. He does not do curved air holes. He always drills straight through the tenon. I will get a new piece in and pull the stem just to see how he does it. There is never any thing interesting going on inside.
If any of you have ever looked at our web site, The Briary, you know that we sell a lot of different high grade pipes. I will tell you that no one does it as well at any price.

HOW DOES HE DO IT? I want to know.

Skip

[d6monk]

Well I definitely want the pipe to at least pass a pipe cleaner. How do you go about drilling the tenon at an angle? It does seem like it might be awfully fiddly as Kurt said.

Thanks again.

[KurtHuhn]

To drill the tenon at an angle, use your drill press instead of the lathe. Just set delrin at an angle in your drill press vise, and drill it. Getting the thing centered, and getting the airway to emerge at just the right place is the fiddly part.

Skip, I have no idea how Claudio does it. I suspect he drills the airway at a different angle than the mortis, like usual, but perhaps he also come in from the tobacco chamber side. I've never examined one too closely, so it's still a mystery to me. And I'm not about to buy one and cut it in half to find out.


(edit - tenon, not mortis. ooops.)

[Sasquatch]

I have a fondness for bent pipes, and make way more bent than straight. The "secrets" as far as I can tell involve the geometry of the pipe (duh). So if you take an "ordinary" sort of billiard, you can drill it right smack in the middle of the mortise until around 45 degrees of bend. Right around there the end of the shank is starting to get rubbed. Options include a wider mortise, or a shorter shank. If you look at most oom pauls that are drilled decently, they have fairly short shanks, which allows the airway hole to be almost horizontal to the tobacco chamber rather than at some horrible angle which would yield an elongated hole presentation on the chamber wall.

Another factor is how close the shank is to the bowl. If it's really far away and the shank has a curve to it, drilling through the center of the mortise face gets more and more difficult.

One little trick I do if a guy wants a really steep pipe pass a cleaner, is to drill a starter hole in the mortise face just after drilling the mortise. Then I'll set up to do the airway and start the bit with some pressure on the back wall of the mortise and feed it into the starter hole. The bit will then bounce forward a little and cut to the chamber, leaving behind a very small ramp that facilitates a cleaner, and offering me the steepest angle physically possible. You can get over 50 degrees bent doing this, and most commercial "full bent" pipes are set around 65 (Savinelli and Chacom for example).

I have really come into the belief that passing a cleaner to the bowl is totally unecessary. Any gurgling a bent pipe is gonna do is gonna happen at the tenon tip, and if you prevent that, the pipe will work. Here is a recent comment on the matter from the guy who bought my full bent "Radice Rind Ripoff" (I hope he smokes Rattrays Red Rapparee in it)

"The shape is full bent. I asked Sasquatch if it will pass a pipe cleaner, and he gave me two options: 1) he can drill it to pass a pipe cleaner, or 2) he can use a special drilling technique of his own where it won't pass a pipe cleaner, but he swears it won't gurgle (i.e. you won't need to clean it during a smoke). I took a chance and went with option #2.

I am seriously impressed with the result. Even when I smoke a straight virginia (even straight out of the tin!), it does not gurgle at all. I have smoked flakes in it that are so moist I can't keep them lit, but the pipe still doesn't gurgle."

We just gotta get these smokers edumacated to our s'perior ways.

[d6monk]

use your drill press instead of the lathe.

Ah, the one tool I don't have, I guess I'll have to look into that.

[pennsyscot]

Does ramping mean elongating the draught hole at the mortise end? Does anyone have photos of a ramped airway? I assume the draught hole is no longer round.

[Sasquatch]

Correct. You take out a bunch of material... I have a crude diagram...



The area marked out in purple would be removed to connect the airway (which is not heading anywhere near the tenon) to the tip of the tenon. Face on, this presents as a slot cut in the face of the mortise bottom.

[ToddJohnson]

O.K. Guys, I have a question on this very subject. For years I have marveled over the ability of Claudio Cavicchi to drill full bent pipes with no ramps and average length mortises. We have sold literaly hundreds of his pipes and never have I seen one that did not pass a pipe cleaner. He does not do curved air holes. He always drills straight through the tenon. I will get a new piece in and pull the stem just to see how he does it. There is never any thing interesting going on inside.
If any of you have ever looked at our web site, The Briary, you know that we sell a lot of different high grade pipes. I will tell you that no one does it as well at any price.

HOW DOES HE DO IT? I want to know.

Skip

Hey Skip,

Claudio uses what I would consider big and short mortises. I own a few full bents from him--ones I actually bought from you years ago--and they've all got at least 3/8" if not 7/16" tenons with shallow mortises. He may also think consciously about which shapes he can execute this way and which ones he cannot, choosing only to make the former and never the latter.

TJ

[d6monk]

Hey Todd,

What is the shortest length that you would consider making a mortise? Some of mine have been pretty short recently and I was just wondering what other makers are doing.

Thanks.

[ToddJohnson]

Hey Todd,

What is the shortest length that you would consider making a mortise? Some of mine have been pretty short recently and I was just wondering what other makers are doing.

Thanks.

Well, it's really all about the amount of friction you're generating. I've seen some very short mortises that were just fine, and some that were just too shallow to provide a solid joint. As a general rule, though, the larger the tenon, the shorter the mortise can be since you've got friction over a comparatively larger surface area. I don't really measure things very much, so I couldn't say what the "shortest length" I would consider using is. It's all about what works.

Todd

[ckr]

Correct. You take out a bunch of material... I have a crude diagram...



The area marked out in purple would be removed to connect the airway (which is not heading anywhere near the tenon) to the tip of the tenon. Face on, this presents as a slot cut in the face of the mortise bottom.

What, no hand print and signature.

[Sasquatch]

Hey I'm so hugely talented in so many fields that I don't like to show off when it comes to Microsoft Paint, all right?

[d6monk]

Thanks Todd,

I've actually been doing just that--making my shorter tenons wider and turning them so they are also a little tighter. So I guess I'm all right.

Also, thanks for the help everyone else--I ended up just ramping the airhole on the pipe I was working on and it looks a lot better than I thought it would. Next week I'm going to start drilling all the stummels I was piling up because I wasn't sure how to drill them.

[TRS]

I ended up just ramping the airhole on the pipe I was working on and it looks a lot better than I thought it would.

Any chance you might wanna share some pictures....?