Thread: Pipe tutorials
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  #361  
Old 2012-10-01, 2:21pm
ohicu812 ohicu812 is offline
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Join Date: Sep 12, 2012
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If you are doing spoons as production or even as fun the cold seal to the mouth piece is a bad idea for several reasons. 1 its and extra step and is setting yourself up to fail. 2 its a bandaid to learning a proper Technique such as tearing it open with a rod or pulling the mouth piece off and clipping it with cutters and cleaning it up. Something i always tell people is the fundementals in learing to make a great spoon are the stepping blocks to moving onto bigger and better things. Learning to tear tubes open both on axis and of axis is very valuable down the road especially if you want to get into more complex scientific pipes. While i see finding a solution to the problem cool I find working through the issue and not giving up and learning to do the process in multiple ways even better....

To make a basic spoon i weld a piece of 26 heavy wall onto a 12 mm blow tube. I make sure the weld is nice and clean and everything spinning true and centered on axsis. If your piece isnt centered FIX IT. I will then heat the mass that will become the body and condense it down and pull it into shape and finish shaping the mouth piece making sure the transition between the blow tube and mouth piece are fairly thin. Keeping this area thin will allow you to come back to this area and tear it off withotlut kiln time. I then condense and shape the bowl section pop the bowl hole, press the bowl, pop akd shape the carb, flatten the bottom and add some cool grippy dots or swirls opposite side of the carb. Warm the gabbers up grab by the head and tear off the blow tube. I keep the piece rotating and with a cold punty to pull out the excess glass. Most people get this area too hot and continue to pull down glass off the mouth piece into the hole area. Once you have the area thin with a sharp flame plung your cleaned off cold rod pull out and repeat if needed then clean up the edge if need be and ream open to size. I can take some pics of the process if need be.
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