Going to try bamboo.

[LatakiaLover]

You're just thinking about ways to incorporate bamboo that require gluing.

Straight and pinned = never, ever comes off.

Curved and glued (or straight and glued, for that matter) = a dice throw. Thermal cycling, temp cycling, and humidity cycling are not kind to the "join point" of materials that behave differently when subjected to those things simultaneously.

Bamboo is weird stuff. It's ENORMOUSLY strong for its weight, but dodgy to attach to anything. Its "bundle of parallel fibers" design doesn't play well that way.

Fun info bit: Bamboo was never used on pipes (Western ones, anyway) until WWII when the briar flow stopped and pipe manufacturers wanted to stretch their exising supply. Since shank flaws killed more pipes during manufacture than anything else, being able to simply cut the shank off and replace it with something cheap and readily available became a Thing. Bamboo was one of the ways they settled on. After the war ended and the briar flow resumed, a small but steady demand for bamboo-shanked pipes remained.

[KurtHuhn]

No.

You insert a drill rod blank into the airway, then press-fit/seat cut-to-length soft metal pins into the opposing holes, and stake all four ends into little mushrooms simultaneously with a single whack using a mallet & setting tool. Mechanical permanence in .001 seconds.

Fuckin fantastic solution. Same idea as pinning folding knife blades or handle scales. That never would have occurred to me. Thank you for that revelation! I can't say if I will ever do this, but it will almost certainly be the foundation of a solution to some other engineering problem.

[LatakiaLover]

This sort of stuff is what you want to use for pins. Hard enough to be durable, soft enough to mushroom when ka-bonked.

$4.22 gets you a foot long piece of the 1mm. i.e. it's actually less expensive per pipe than epoxy.


https://www.ottofrei.com/Argentium-930- ... 12-Lengths

[wdteipen]

Like seamonster, I face it on the lathe using pin gauges. Pretty quick and easy. I prefer to use a Delrin sleeve as a mortise unless using really small bamboo simply because bamboo is very absorbent and I've seen countless high end bamboo pipes with super loose stems.

[n80]

Just got my bamboo. Around each ring node there are little stem like projections which will need to be removed and smoothed down. Is there a process for doing this neatly? Maybe snap them off with needle nose pliers? Wire cutters?

[LatakiaLover]

Believe it or not, bamboo has 91 genera and over 1000 species. How it is "handled" for pipe making depends on not only what flavor it is, but a number of aesthetic choices that are up to you.

And with that I'm out. Gotta step aside for Premal, Jesse J, and whoever else on this site that messes with bamboo a fair amount. (i.e. I just copy stuff)

[caskwith]

Just sand down the little nodes until you find them aesthetically pleasing. Some like to put blobs of epoxy on there after as well. If you have any that are a bit spongy you can soak them in CA glue.

[Ocelot55]

Well, George invoked my name so I guess I'll chime in.

I really don't mess with bamboo that much, but there are a bunch of ways to skin that cat. A lot depends on your tooling, what look you want to achieve, and how much you care about the longevity of the pipe. As for your specific questions:

1. You can freehand drill the bamboo airway and mortise. Then use pin gauges to chuck it up and face the ends. Super easy.

2. The bamboo can be lined completely, but most folks opt for using only a small connecting piece between the bamboo and bowl and the stem and bamboo. If the bamboo is large enough, I opt for larger tenons machined from ebonite or delrin. If the pipe is a bent instead of straight and the draft hole through the bamboo is on a different axis from the draft through the bowl for Pete's sake make the bamboo detachable from the bowl. Eventually that bamboo will clog up and without the ability to take it apart and re-drill the draft you will be SOL.

3. Finishing can also be done a variety of ways. I'm all about fast and easy, so a bit of epoxy or CA on the nodes and a quick spit coat of shellac seem to do the trick. Some folks like the matt look of unfinished bamboo. Some use lacquer. Some cover it in gold leaf.....