Stone Pipes

[moose eater]

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Had this piece of spotted sandstone. made a nice little pipe. i gave it to a friend for Christmas.

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The sandstone works as well under heat as harder stones like granite or onyx??

I had a favorite (smaller) (white with touches of black?) onyx pipe 40 years ago from Mexico, that, when stood up on the end of the bowl, looked like an abstract little dude wearing a narrower top hat. Called him Stoney Brook.

My wife's been reading along on occasion, and is intrigued now; she's craft oriented, has the tile saw I referenced earlier, and sees the potential for some limited side income, perhaps at the local Farmers' Market or craft fairs..

Thanks!

 

[paper thorn]

finishing a couple dark pipes

finishing a couple dark pipes

hey moose eater, I smoked out of that sandstone at a Christmas party with a few old guys. we broke in that pipe and it hit great and never got hot that we noticed.

I've been wondering if I could get a local dispensary to sell them or sell them online or something as a business, but I'm not sure.


finishing up the black one i was marking on in the above post.


in an earlier post i showed the rock and blank this one came from and had it marked for cutting. here the bowl is drilled, and chipped out. the rest is likely to break the edge of the bowl,(which sucks) so I have to grind the rest of the material out.




Grinding the bowl with a sintered burr. so muck better than using worn 5 mm bits and things. still though, the plated burrs are better for rounding the edges of the bowl. but the sintered burr is way better for the bottom. The last pic shows it done.
the guy loves it.

a couple guys have asked me about getting one. i will be sending them out soon. fear not.

 

[moose eater]

Nice stuff, Paper.

Cool.

Businesses often want a commission; how much, is the question.

Farmers' markets and craft fairs typically charge by the table/sq. ft. of space, so there's sometimes heavy over-head in that direction, too.

Up here, out on the Parks Hwy, and sometimes other roads, I sometimes see folks selling jerky or smoked fish, or even fresh seafood on ice from the coast, on the side of the road, at rest-stop pull-outs, with their sandwich-sign adverts ahead of their location a bit, and more immediately around their vehicle.

Not sure of the technical legality of it, but they do it, and it seems there's notably less over-head in taking that route.... Not to mention the opportunity to get out of the house, and away from home/town for some business-oriented camp-outs. ;^>)

My guess is that (up here, and a bit away from Federal turf), some place not too far from Denali on the Parks Hwy, would be a good bet; tourists coming and going to Denali, wanting something truly Alaskan, not mass produced with laser jigs in China.

No clue of similar options in your area. Just thinking of ideas.

 

[paper thorn]

I thought this was quartzite when i started, but figured out as i cut it that it is sandstone. it has set just like this for a couple weeks. I'll probably finish it someday. maybe.

The spotted block is a really nice piece of sandstone. I have a blank of it cut but fucked it up by slicing too much off of it while shaping, so it's kind of small. i hate it when i do that.

The poker/scraper is a plagioclase feldspar handle epoxied onto a piece of brazing rod. Deja vu. i think i've written about this before.




Random pics to finish this post. The white one at this stage still had a way too fat stem, narrowed it down to look normal

I'm going to try to have a more coherent format, with more order.

like showing one from rock to pipe. i don't know. just seems unorganized to me.

 

[paper thorn]

a few more pics.

a few more pics.


This is a 10 mm hole saw in the water swivel. I drill 3 hole for the bowl and chip it out from the middle.



some of the ones i've been showing. mostly done. The pic on the right is a simple piece of stainless rod with a slit. i take a strip of wet/dry sandpaper and stick the end in the slit, wrap it around and use it like a burr to smooth out inside curves, like where the bowl and stem meet.



That sintered burr. looks like it is going to last a long time. I think i need to up the speed on the drill press when i use it though. the rest of the pipes mostly done.

 

[paper thorn]

That's an oil stick I'm using to hone the stem hole with.


I get the sticks in assorted grits from 180 to 1200. They break easy and I'm not sure they work all that great, I'll find something that'll work better. I saw some round 4mm diamond files in four different grits. I'll be getting them soon, they should be better. Hopefully.

The pic on the right shows a bag of 5mm bits and a 10mm hole saw.


Sanding by hand because of all the curves.


here i've epoxied an old broken drill bit into the end of a 60mm long 5mm diamond bit so I can drill deeper holes. they simply do not make any 5mm hole saws over 60mm long. which is like 2 3/8" I want to make longer stems.

 

[paper thorn]

One of those cheap sets of diamond burrs my wife got for me. i use them for rounding bowls and grinding curves.


This is the ones that I've been showing all done with screens.
i just previewed the post and about half of them have screens here and they look a little bland in the pic. I'm going to post some individual shots of them that might be a little better.

Then I'm going to go through the camera and the pics i have of the new batch. I've got them all mostly shaped, and have drilled a lot of holes. still lots more drilling to go. I think they're going to look pretty good.



Up first is this low profile black spoon.
it's actually more reddish brown, and that's not a crack on the side of the bowl, looks like a cat hair got in the pic.

 

[meadowman]

wow, some of the markings on them is beautiful….great work man!

 

[paper thorn]

This is a sweet little jasper or agate that looks like a wood grain. I have some cool pics of it with its parent rock coming up.

This one is Siskiyou's if he wants it.


btw, JW, and anyone else I've promised a pipe to, hang on, I'm getting to it.

 

[moose eater]

Very nice pipe!

 

[paper thorn]

brown striped pipe

brown striped pipe

This is a cool little pipe from a really nice piece of what I think is quartzite, it looks layered, stripes overlayed with bent on straight layers.


it really needs to be polished a bit more, you can see little white specks. that goes away with more polishing.

 

[StRa]

here a nice docufilm about calumet..... I hope you enjoy it!

Calumet PIPE OF PEACE

boom!

 

[paper thorn]

brown opal breccia

brown opal breccia



I made this one kind of fat, i did not want to try to make it into a spoon. who knows if a crack or vug or other instability could have caused a disaster, and it was such a nice piece of stone.

it looks better in person, all those white marks are tiny banded agate that filled in cracks with bands of white and blue. but they're tiny. the whole thing is brown common opal that looks like it broke up and was filled in with the same material. so an opal breccia in an opal matrix.

I'll post the rest of these individual pieces while I am repairing my drill press. the coils spring that raises the spindle/quill back up broke. 13 bucks for a new one. soon, i'd rig up a cable and spring or weights, if i can figure out how to do it with things i have on hand.

 

[paper thorn]

Ink Stained and Irish Spring?

Ink Stained and Irish Spring?


i decided selfishly to keep this one. i call it ink stain.
my kid absconded with my red jasper, so i use this one, but it's this next one that i have come to love the most.


this is a little wedge, i call this style a wedge, i don't know if there's a term for it or not.

It's the same as my pedestal stone. A local gem and mineral club geologist told me it was Serpentine. well, the green is, nice crystallized serp. and limestone. it's highly indurated, meaning it was seriously smashed, but not into marble. it's one of my favorite rocks.


I dropped it from waist high on to concrete. arrgh! you can see a tiny spot on each side of the stem hole. soft material, so i sanded it out easily by hand with some 400 grit wet/dry sandpaper.

 

[bilko]

-

 

[paper thorn]

drilling the small hole in the middle of the bowl


then pop out the core and keep going

 

[paper thorn]

the last three pipes from the last batch, well two because I already loaded the ink stain pipe.

APOLOGIES to the folks I'm supposed to be sending a pipe to, I've just had a hard time getting going since Christmas, but I'm back in the groove, and have spent a lot of time out on the drill press.
I rigged it up, I'll show you later lmao.

by the way Starke, never clean that piece with vinegar. You'll etch off the polish.

I have thre pipes, all different types of stone, and I only use water. hot water out of the tap. Soak it a minute and wipe out the bowl with a paper towel, run the bore with a pipe cleaner. it'll be clean like a new pipe.

Am I repeating myself? i think i might have already posted that. oh well. bear with me when i do that. lol.


That little wood grain patterened one at the beginning of this post. here is the rest of the rock. I'm cutting the last pieces and will be shaping them soon.

 

[paper thorn]

it's 4:20 in the morning. hang on while i hit this Cheese.


find a promising rock and cut it open to see what's in it. this one's kind of pink. I think I know someone who has a girlfriend that wants one. she'll like this pink stone.


This is where I get a little freaked out. I feel like i just ruined this piece. I freehand almost everything. even when i draw it out like you see here, i still end up just cutting out the whole thing instead of stopping after I cut out the design and draw on the side. oh no, not me. just saw away like i know what i'm doing. but then I'll make it work and it's going to be awesome.

 

[paper thorn]

these last four posts are all new. check em out.

i'll be almost up to date soon. i've got a dozen pics of the latest batch all sorted, now i have to resize them, and i'll start putting them up in a day or two. I think this post gets me up to date with all the pics already in my album.


That green one in the bottom is a sweet rock, shaped like that because of the weird shape of the rock. The behemoth striped one is the first pipe I ever cut and shaped. here it still has no bowl or stem hole.

it's huge, but i modeled it after a glass pipe someone had brought over and we had been smoking out of. too big imo, maybe i'll cut it down to size. maybe



this marble should make a nice pipe.



slouching towards a Adena/Hopewell inspired form, not quite there.
next batch...

the two on the right show me shaping a ?mudstone/siltstone?
kinda big, we'll see...

 

[gr8fulguitr]

wicked cool.
i just got my wife a stone pipe. She was not sure at first. She thinks I crazy. but i luv stone pipes....and i dont combust anymore

I wish more people would make real stone pipes. Glass is cool until ol butterfingrz gets ahold of them and they break.


I soak mine in water overnight to clean, sound reasonable?
sometimes with dish soap? i give a good soak and then work it over witha pipe cleaner


excellent thread!
rock on with the Rocks