#19 - Billiard

[BrianMadsen]

... and yet another straight billiard in the gallery!
Blow it to pieces!!!

[sandahlpipe]

Brian, This is a pretty nice billiard. A few details will really make it shine.

1. Your button is not symmetrical and there is a small area behind the button that isn't even as you can see by the reflection on the second-to-last picture.

2. The stem itself is a tad long in relation to the stummel. A slightly shorter (maybe 1/4-1/2") stem would balance the pipe better visually.

3. You have a reasonable amount of the chin removed, but a little more could come off there. The waist around the bowl is a little flatter than the last little bit near the top of the bowl. The slight curve at the top should be a little more subtle while the waist should come out a little more.

4. The radius you used between shank and bowl is too sharp and looks like a crease. It's difficult to find a balance between having too much material around the bowl/shank junction and making the shank and bowl look like they are two distinct pieces. I think you often have to go too far to know where the line is.

5. It looks like there's a slight rounding of the shank near the stem. This is often an indicator that the stem didn't fit properly when you sanded the area.

Keep up the good work. I think you're headed in the right direction.

[wdteipen]

Not bad. Jeremiah hit the major points. Only thing I'd add is to not round the last 1/4 of the bowl near the rim. If you're going to round the bowl slightly then do it the entire bowl from the 2/3 mark up and do it only slightly or go relatively straight from the 2/3 mark to the rim depending on whether you're going Italian or English.

[Charl]

The first thing my eye caught was the top line of the stem. There is a slight bulge closer to the stemface. It should be straight. I can't really see from the photos if the bottom line is OK, but I assume it will be the same there.
Next thing that I noticed were the cheeks, as stated earlier.
Would love to see the next one!

[BrianMadsen]

Thanks guys. It sure is difficult to make a perfect junction between bowl and shank - and it's even more difficult to make Jeremiah happy
I'm not sure I agree with the stem length. After I made the rough shape, i noticed that the pipe was almost a replica of a stanwell billiard of mine, and that billiard has got a bit more length to it actually, so I think it looks fine, at least in comparison to the stanwell billiard. And at last, a pipe can look very different when you are holding it in your hand, and not just looking at pictures.

But, you guys made it clear about rounding the walls or keeping them straight. I had a bit of a challenge with that on this pipe, but hey, i'm still learning

When you guys say "cheeks", what exactly do you mean? I'm danish, and still not used to all the english terms.

[Sasquatch]

Brian, here is a diagram for you.





The stem is longer than the stummel by the amount shown, that's why people are saying it's too long. Classic pipes are 50/50 in that department.


Things to think about - the curve on the bowl is abrupt right at the top, then the bowl (user-side anyway) flattens out some. It's somewhat better on the front side, more of a uniform curve. This is the hard part, taking this very shallow curve all the way to the bottom and sweeping under the bowl gracefully, without making a big fat apple out of the thing.

The stem fishtail is awkard, probably starts to early and the transition is ugly where it begins to flare out - again the idea of maintaining some kind of subtle flow through there (all while doing everything crisply!) is tough to manage.

So you are cutting things pretty well, too well in some cases, you need to relax the transition, find the flow of the shape while at the same time making everything tight. That's why it's hard.

[Thomas Tkach]

Am I right in noting that this is halfway between a classic billiard (50/50) and a bing? The stem has been called too long, but could it also be too short? What's the proper ratio for a bing?

[BrianMadsen]

A bing should have a longer shank, not only a longer stem.

[BrianMadsen]

And Todd, thanks for making that diagram. Pictures sometimes helps.
but i wonder where you got that info about the 50/50 in length?

[Sasquatch]

There's been a few diagrams posted here and there, and these kind of proportion issues are something I've been working on for about... ever.

[BrianMadsen]

I see I just thought if there were any kind of "rule book" about the more classic shapes. I've read a lot about it, like the differences between lovat, lumberman, liverpool and canadian shapes and such, but there seems to be a lot "unwritten rules" about the classic shapes. I wonder what really defined these rules...?? And also, the Stanwell billard i mentioned before has the same "problem" in length - it looks a lot like my billard. So, why do a classic company like Stanwell do this on a classic billiard design, if it's not classic at all? to twist things a bit?

[Sasquatch]

Most likely because they had 9,000 stummels and 9,000 stems and just matched them and shipped them, because who cares?


Where do these rules come from? Well, you can go real deep and look at stuff like what's called the "golden ratio", and assume that every good looking pipe or its components somehow subscribe to that, you can just go back in this case and look at who defined the shapes in question (answer is, French pipemaking houses of the 19th century), or you can go totally mystical and talk about how the pipe relates to the human hand, and what it should look like at exactly one cubit's distance... there's lots of abstruse things discussed.

But at the end of the day, a billiard, for whatever reasons (probably practicality) is a pipe where you take the shank length from the bowl = bowl height from the shank, make the shank about 1/4 of the bowl height, and make the stem about the same length as the stummel. Once you can manufacture this thing and make it look good, the proportions of ... just about everything else, actually, will be easy to spot and easy to decide on. I don't know why.

[LatakiaLover]

Once you can manufacture this thing and make it look good, the proportions of ... just about everything else, actually, will be easy to spot and easy to decide on. I don't know why.

This bit of magick happens with practically every physical object on Earth. No one knows why. Lots of interesting speculations from the evolutionary biologists about symmetry being a channel marker of health so humans are hard-wired to respond to it positively & etc., but nobody truly knows. Some of it is cultural---what constitutes a physically beautiful woman varies from place to place, for example---but nowhere does that variance go so far as to embrace asymmetry.

The good news is that the more you are exposed to and have experience with a particular object---in this case Western tradition, 19th and 20th century tobacco pipes---the easier and faster recognizing the finer points of its execution becomes.

[Thomas Tkach]

A bing should have a longer shank, not only a longer stem.

I see that now. In my mind I was thinking of the proportions of a prince (and a pot I have that mimics them). Could similar proportions work on a billiard? Would that be a stem twice as long as the stummel?

[Sasquatch]

It... could be, yes. But the overall visual feel depends on the bowl height, the bowl thickness, the shank thickness, where the break is in the stem/shank, whether there's a metal band, etc etc. And that's where the mathemetization totally falls on it's face. As soon as you try it, you'll realize that there's 8,000 variables and you go right back to saying "Ahh, THIS looks right."