They were right about Absylux being easy stuff to work with. On the lathe, it turns a lot like ebonite: smooth as silk. No need to worry about cutting too fast and chipping things up like acrylic does. Instead, it will make a dig, but it won't just blow up like acrylic does when you cut too fast.
Boring the draft hole was a breeze. No galling, no stuck drill bits. With a straight drill bit, it clears chips better than anything I think I've ever drilled. And with a tapered drill bit, it "loaded-up" like you expect tapered drill bits to do, but it still didn't gall up like acrylic tends to do. So there's not much need for cutting fluid if you take your time and clear your tapered drill bits from time to time.
If anything, Absylux was a little TOO easy to turn: first, you quickly wind up with a wad of black Brillo pad wrapped around your piece, closely resembling a badly birdnested baitcasting fishing reel; and second, if everybody knew how easy it was to make a stem from this stuff, that might be real bad for professional pipemakers. So shhhh.
And very little smell. If I had to guess, I would say that the smell is about 1/4 as strong as when you're cutting acrylic or vulcanite, and comparable to when you're cutting ebonite. Less "chemically" than acrylic, and a lot like the inside of a styrofoam cup. But light while you're working it, and it seems to disappear entirely, by my nose, after about an hour.
Filing, again, this stuff works a lot like ebonite. Real smooth.
Sanding was ... different. On a big belt sander doing rough tapering, some stock sanded clear off, and a little bit melted and clung on, similar to acrylic, I would say. But no biggie. Hand sanding after filling, I found that it liked wet-sanding slightly better than dry sanding, but again, no real problem there. I think I just found that finer sandpaper didn't load-up as quickly when it was wet, than when it was dry.
Buffing was a breeze. The only thing I noticed was that Absylux didn't respond as well to tripoli as ebonite or lucite. But once you switched to a soft cotton buff and some carnauba, the depth of the blackness and the shine really popped -- see pictures.
In the teeth, for better or for worse, Absylux feels nearly identical to ebonite. It's quite comfortable, but I could also picture this stuff wearing-through a lot like ebonite. It might even wear through a little faster.
Or maybe not. Because, interestingly enough, Absylux also gives Delrin® a run for its money. I cut this tenon about four-thousandths of an inch oversize, slid it into a freshly re-cut mortise on my old pipe without any wax, whatsoever, and it was real smooth. Like Delrin-smooth.
So depending on how Absylux wears in the teeth -- more like Ebonite or more like Delrin -- I can definitely picture myself switching over to Absylux on all my pipes. I'm really just waiting to see how my own stem holds up, wear-wise.
And also how well that bend holds up over time.
I'm also reserving judgement until I hear how some of your experiments with Absylux or other generic ABS rod stock work out. Then I'll make my own determination about using Absylux on my for-sale pipes.
Oh yes, I also did a due-diligence flammability test on Absylux, just to satisfy my own curiosity. They make a flame-resistant version of Absylux, but it's not FDA approved. So I bought the non-flame-resistant version that is FDA approved, but I wanted to do a quick comparison of sorts.
Basically, I held a lighter underneath a piece of scrap, and it took about 15 seconds for the piece to burn on its own. But compare that to the 5 seconds it took for an old vulcanite stem I had lying around to burn on its own.
So, yeah, I think that's acceptable: less flammable than vulcanite/ebonite, by my own, not-so-scientific test, anyway.
