On Making Classics for Your First Pipes

[Tyler]

I think making a bunch of classics as the gold standard of pipe-making education is a load of crap.

I say make whatever the Hades you want to make.

I've said before and and I'll say again, I don't think it is true AT ALL that it is impossible to critique a non-classic. It's usually quite easy. Most early pipes are quite bad, whether billiard or duck-billed blow cutties. Offering three or four tips from either pipe is plenty for a new guy to learn. Most new makers are not going to fix 25 errors on their next pipe. For the most part, they can't. They aren't seeing what is being described fully. They aren't "zoomed in" enough on the details. That's the nature of things. No big deal. Offer a few tips, zoom them in a little, and do it again next pipe.

All that said, I don't think there's anything wrong with making a dozen billiards. If that's what you like, rock on. It's a great shape, and good to learn. I just happen to think you can accomplish the same thing copying a Lars or a Davidson.

The vast majority of us are making pipes to have fun. Certainly involvement on this forum carries some sense that one wants to also get good while having fun, but I think we act like each new guy is obligated to become a pipe maker selling pipes for $500+. I think that's a mistake.

Perhaps I'm just sensitive to this issue out of parental frustration. I love that my kids enjoy playing organized sports, but I'm irritated that the leagues that are available to them as they get older are increasingly obsessed with college-scholarship prep instead of pleasure. High-dollar travel teams with paid coaches, 15 hours of practice a week, and 7 months "seasons". Maybe it's just a cultural phenomenon this day and age, but I think it's ok to just have fun at something instead of spend gazillions of hours to become an all-American. Sand-lot baseball, church-parking-lot volleyball, and crappy amateurish blowfish and billiards are just fine, IMO. One needn't be the best ever to validate the doing of something.

Tyler

P.S. I haven't been in the pulpit and preached in over two years. Maybe I'm just feeling the itch.

[LatakiaLover]

I just happen to think you can accomplish the same thing copying a Lars Davidson.

Who is Lars Davidson?

[Sasquatch]

Sure. You can make whatever, have fun with it, and if you do enough of it, you'll maybe drift into making pipes that people want to pay for. That doesn't HAVE to be the goal. It really doesn't, and as a guy who, strangely enough has wandered and bumped and ground his way into being a mid-grade pipemaker of essentially traditional English and Italian sorts of pipes (and no one could be more surprised than me), there's an argument to be made that I should be working harder to be making better pipes in some way or another than I am. So you have to balance out the fun, the profit, the personal satisfaction in all this.

Here is an argument that is fairly strongly for making at least some traditional shapes: They are more defined, you have something particular to aim for, and this process melds hand/eye skill with a fairly simple set of aesthetics. The absence of "extra" stuff, extra material, forces the pipe in a certain direction and it's very obvious usually, where deviations from "should be" have occurred.

It's pretty easy for an experienced pipe maker to accurately critique a freehand, but a less experienced maker is not likely to fully understand a bunch of the ideas that will be in play in such a critique. Once you've learned these various ideas, principles, etc (presumably by making better and better simple pipes) you can apply them successfully to more complicated shapes.

So I'd argue that it's easier to learn the skills and aesthetic ideas required basically for all nice pipes (in the Danish tradition that we are mostly talking about) by working through some well-defined shapes, burning a few patterns into the cortex, and then moving on.

This is born out by an analysis of the typical beginner's freehand - you know the one, with the triple chess-pawn stem with double amber and blue rings, the nickel band, the bamboo/black palm/olive shank, and the shapeless bowl. "It's an egg/acorn." No it isn't. A mishmash of shapes, colors, lines, a pipe that lacks cohesion or any kind of aesthetic identity. And all because the maker is so goddam excited about making a pipe that he's gonna make the raddest, baddest, meanest motherfucking pipe that anyone ever saw! We've all done it! And they were shitty, and they taught us.... nothing. At some point, someone has to step in and say "You know, this would look better if you curved it like so." Ah-ha! That magic moment where the new maker sees what the more experienced maker sees. Understands one particular aesthetic concept on one particular pipe. Then you have progress, and it's much, much easier to have these moments if you aren't working with a hundred twisting lines and an afterburning turbofan on the pipe in question.

See, no one comes here and says "Hey guys, I want to make an Eskimo, and... I don't care if it's ugly, I just ... I'm dyin to make one, help me out here!" Nono. It's "I want to make an Eskimo because it's the raddest baddest meanest motherfucking shape I've ever seen and I'm itching to make a wicked one." To do so, you need skills, practice, aesthetic sense combined with crafting. And that doesn't just happen for most of us. Sure as shit not for me. And fucking Cryder I don't even want to hear from.

[LatakiaLover]

... the raddest, baddest, meanest motherfucking pipe that anyone ever saw!

[LatakiaLover]

So far:

Sas 1, Tyler 0

[Ocyd]

If raddest, baddest, meanest motherfucking pipe that anyone ever saw isn't the goal anymore. I think we have all lost something very important. That whole Robert Frost fork in the road thing. Eh it's not one of those things for either side to win because one path leads towards technical mastery and the other unending discovery?. Both are valid for sharpening your skills either way, as long as you're persistent about it.

[sandahlpipe]

I'm one of those noobs who started making freehands right away before I had a clue about anything. It took me literally a year before I made my first billiard. I thought it was a good pipe because I didn't have an eye to see the difference between mine and a real billiard. At that point it wouldn't have mattered if I were making a billiard or a copy of a Lars, I would have deceived myself into thinking it was something it wasn't.

But then several guys told me to make ten billiards and I listened to them. And my skillset took a leap forward. People then actually started buying my pipes. Then I started having people critique my billiards and once again my skills improved. By contrast, the critique I've received from blowfish I've made wasn't very helpful. I mean, how do you help someone get from a melted lollipop to a blowfish? Not saying it can't be taught. Just saying I don't know anyone who wants to teach that way.

Can you learn by making billiards? Absolutely. Can you learn by making freehands? Only if you're more skilled than most. Unless you just want to have fun making pipes for friends. And who wants to be critiqued anyway when they're making pipes for friends?

One final thought. When I started making the ugly freehands, I was making them for myself and friends. I didn't think I would ever sell them. It was the fun of making them that drove me to keep doing it. It's still the fun that keeps me making pipes. If I had intended to sell them from the beginning, it would have helped me greatly to discipline myself to make the classics. I'm really glad that someone encouraged me to make classics early on. I think I'd be even better if someone had encouraged me to do it sooner.

[LittleBill]

I think making a bunch of classics as the gold standard of pipe-making education is a load of crap.

I say make whatever the Hades you want to make.

It all depends on your goals I guess. I must respectfully disagree based on my own teaching experience. I have had hundreds of students pass through my shop. Many of them are rank beginners. They arrive with the notion that they are going to make something like this:



Or this:



When I insist they start on something like this:



I often get disagreement, resistance, even argument. So I make a deal. I tell them that they can make one like the last one first, and then we can make one like one of the others before the day is over. By the time the day is three quarters over, and they are still hacking out the inside of their first bowl, they start to get the idea. A lot of them are even sheepish about their earlier intransigence.

You gots to learn the basics before you can do the hard stuff. That is universal. People who skip to the hard stuff right away are usually frustrated and discouraged, unless they are surrounded by people who dote on them no matter what they shovel out. Or, unless they have gigantic egos that permit them to think their stuff is good.

If a person is not willing to learn what makes for good proportions in a traditional design, it is going to be very difficult to make good proportions in a freehand design. Some people can. Most cannot. If those people are going to be happy with what they make, and their circle of friends will be happy, that is all that counts. But if they want total strangers to be happy, they have got to learn how to do it right, and an unavoidable part of that is learning basics. I'm not talking about a seven year apprenticeship or making hundreds of one thing. I am talking about working out the issues and learning how to figure out what needs to happen and how on something objective.

I have also had the dubious honor of having to critique turnings in front of large audiences. Art pieces are the worst, because the caveat is ALWAYS "I meant to do that" when something really ugly or lacking is pointed out, no matter how gracefully it is done. So I have been there and done that - just not with pipes. Yet.

[phmann]

I like allowing people to learn their own way. If you tell me to do something a certain way because you know better, I want to do the exact opposite to try and prove you wrong. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but I'm not going to learn any other way.

[WCannoy]

In retrospect, I wish I had started out learning on the classic shapes. I also wish I had access, in those early years, to the kind of ball-busting critique that this forum has become known for. There are plenty of pipe forums and social networking resources out there where you can just post photos of your work for folks to just "oohh and aahhh" at, but that won't make you a better pipemaker.

The good, honest, harsh critiques are this forum's greatest strength. Amateur, hobbyist, wanna-be-a professional, or seasoned veteran, whatever your end game, if your goal is not to make the best pipes you can possibly make, you shouldn't be here.

FWIW

[LatakiaLover]

It boils down to whether or not the best way to learn something is to 1) shoot for a series of specific, objectively measurable targets of increasing difficulty, or 2) wing it (a.k.a. "find your own way")

It applies to everything, of course, not just pipe making. From music to piloting aircraft to gymnastics to race car driving.

The answer isn't even seriously debatable... #1 gets the best result the vast majority of the time, while #2 occasionally works for people with a high degree of natural talent.

Also not debatable---and the underlying cause of most of what appears to be disagreement about the issue---the is that #1 is much closer to work than play, while #2 is the opposite. And humans are ferociously tenacious rationalizers.

[RadDavis]

All that said, I don't think there's anything wrong with making a dozen billiards. If that's what you like, rock on. It's a great shape, and good to learn. I just happen to think you can accomplish the same thing copying a Lars or a Davidson.

I think Tyler is right, and the key is copying something and not "doing what you feel" or trying to make something that's in your mind's eye with no example to look at.

Classics are easier to copy than blowfish, IMO, but they can both be copied. And the newbie blowfish copier will soon realize his folly and say "Fuck this shit, I'm gonna try something with fewer lines in it."

Rad

[LatakiaLover]

All that said, I don't think there's anything wrong with making a dozen billiards. If that's what you like, rock on. It's a great shape, and good to learn. I just happen to think you can accomplish the same thing copying a Lars or a Davidson.

I think Tyler is right, and the key is copying something and not "doing what you feel" or trying to make something that's in your mond's eye with no example to look at.

Classics are easier to copy than blowfish, IMO, but they can both be copied. And the newbie blowfish copier will soon realize his folly and say "Fuck this shit, I'm gonna try something with fewer lines in it."

Rad

Tyler made his case with a bit of built-in cognitive dissonance, burying the "copy" sentence in an argument that implies that anything goes is best.

If what he meant was WHAT you try to duplicate doesn't matter nearly as much as THAT you try to duplicate something---so that the result is measurable as opposed to subjective---then I agree completely. To me the word "classic" means Danish scoops & etc. just as much as English standards

[The Smoking Yeti]

Fuck it. I agree with Tyler.

[wmolaw]

What the hell. I have not really commented much, more lurking and learning and the information you guys/gales provide is really appreciated. But I really think Tyler is right. Sure, many here may think they are in it for the living, but those numbers are, I suspect, quite small no matter what each person thinks.

I believe the engineering is more important than the shape. If a person can make a great smoking pipe, great engineering, wonderful smokeability, then whatever shape they want to make becomes more personal expression.

Learn the engineering, how to make the pipe draw well, smoke wonderfully, feel great in your mouth, and then play all you want with shape, size.

Of course, as I said, I ain't making pipes to sell. I'm making pipes for fun, to give to friends so they can start smoking pipes and doing my best to increase the numbers of pipe smokers because I really believe pipe smoking is the best way to enjoy tobacco and, really, to slow down, think, enjoy and even communicate. Nothing better than seeing young folks smoke a pipe, how they really love it. So, I make pipes, give them away to friends, especially younger guys and hope they understand just how great pipe smoking really is.

Just my take.

[BobR]

I completely agree with the notion of new makers copying pipes. For me, I really do feel most comfortable copying a straight billiard because I have several good examples that I own and can study. I also think it does teach you to make straight lines. So that made it a logical choice for me. At this early point in my pipe making I would be very reluctant to make a type of pipe I didn't own.

I do think making a freehand as a first pipe is a negative though and delays improvement.

P.S. LittleBill, if your throwing away that second bowl due to the holes in it, I'd be glad to take it off your hands. That's a really beautiful piece. Did you make it?

[LittleBill]

P.S. LittleBill, if your throwing away that second bowl due to the holes in it, I'd be glad to take it off your hands. That's a really beautiful piece. Did you make it?

Thanks Bob. They are all mine, and I had a guy call dibs before it was even done. I've been doing that a long time. One of these days I hope to have pipes in the same league.

[baweaverpipes]

Although I'm not as old as Rod Davies, I'm old school.
Maybe it's because I like the classics that influences my thoughts, but learning to make the classics is a good starting point for learning.
There are basic fundamentals that one needs to learn before they move into more intricate pieces.

[Literaryworkshop]

Boy did I pick a good day to drop in again after some time away from this forum!

I'm a beginner, and all I know is what it's like to try to make pipes without a lathe. I wish I had the proper basic equipment to make the basic shapes. I've tried a few times, and I'm starting to get the idea of where those early attempts failed. I'm not yet at the point where I can replicate a design exactly as I've drawn it out, but I'm getting closer.

I do, however, know something about learning new skills. In general, I think that there is a pretty specific set of basic skills that any beginner needs to learn in order to learn a new craft, whether that's learning to make dining room tables, learning to paint portraits, or learning to play guitar. Even there, though, the path toward competence is pretty broad. Different masters will disagree sharply on what to include in the "essential skills" category--though they will agree strongly on most of the basic skills.

Then there are always your eccentrics, people who are "self-taught" and have traveled a long and twisting path toward competence. Often the eccentrics have developed clever work-arounds to make up for basic skills they never learned, and what they do works well enough for their purposes, but it will drive the traditionalists nuts. Plus, for every successful self-taught eccentric, there are a hundred failed dilettantes who never had the self-discipline to learn the basics one way or another and didn't have the raw talent to figure it out on their own.

[Ocyd]

P.S. LittleBill, if your throwing away that second bowl due to the holes in it, I'd be glad to take it off your hands. That's a really beautiful piece. Did you make it?

Thanks Bob. They are all mine, and I had a guy call dibs before it was even done. I've been doing that a long time. One of these days I hope to have pipes in the same league.

All the tobacco would fall out though, you know it's not enough for it to just look pretty