Mouthpiece Study

[JHowell]

Thought y'all might find this interesting if you haven't read it already -- Neill Roan has a study of mouthpiece configuration and thickness on his blog, "A Passion for Pipes." Surprising.

http://web.mac.com/neillarcherroan/A_Pa ... /Blog.html

[LexKY_Pipe]

Jack

Thanks for bringing our attention to this resource. Wow, very interesting.

[KurtHuhn]

To be honest, I'm not all that surprised. If you look at the rough average of bit thickness (based on estimation, not calculation) it appears to be somewhere in the neighborhood of of 4.16mm. Convert that to inches, and it's .163+. That's close enough to say "it read .16" on the calipers". If that's the thickness someone has standardized on, then it makes sense that the deviation would be small enough not to be noticed on a calipers that only display two decimal places.

[JHowell]

Except when you consider how little .01mm is. Now, some selection has occurred, since these are pipes owned by one man, who, presumably, has already rejected or sold pipes with thick, clunky bits. It may say more about his sensitivity to thickness than some cosmic link between makers, but the deviation is smaller than I would have expected.

[RadDavis]

Hi Jack,

I know that when I started hand cutting stems, I was sort of flying by the seat of my pants (I did know the thickness should be about .150), until Peter heeschen told me that my bits were too wide.

After that I got a pipe from him and used his bit dimensions as a model for my own, since his reputation for bit comfort was extremely good.

Probably most new makers do something similar, and they all sort of migrate to a "standard" of around .150 thick and .650 wide.

Rad

[hazmat]

Hi Jack,

I know that when I started hand cutting stems, I was sort of flying by the seat of my pants (I did know the thickness should be about .150), until Peter heeschen told me that my bits were too wide.

After that I got a pipe from him and used his bit dimensions as a model for my own, since his reputation for bit comfort was extremely good.

Probably most new makers do something similar, and they all sort of migrate to a "standard" of around .150 thick and .650 wide.

Rad

Yep, that's about it. I'm still learning a ton about handcutting stems but when I initially started, it was all about finding a bit that I thought comfortable and using those dimensions as a sort of benchmark. With a few stems under my belt now, I've begun paying closer attention to other handmade stems and sort of trying to work the things I like about them into what I'm doing.

These are interesting articles, though. For a novice stem maker, it definitely provides some food for thought regarding what you're doing with a stem and why, especially that last inch, wherein I'm still trying to master the flaring technique.