The more affordable “Ebauchons” are briar blocks that have been cut across the grain, while the pricier “plateaus” are cut with the grain and maintains the craggy outer surface of the briar burl. Briar can be cut two different ways, and each way yields a unique looking block.
Once harvested, the briar must be boiled and dried to remove sap and moisture, but the process is long and must be carefully controlled to prevent the briar blocks from drying too quickly, which can result in splits or fissures in the wood. It is as expensive as wood goes, mainly because until a heath tree is approximately 40 years old its briar is not considered to be ready for harvesting. Briar is a type of wood harvested from erica arborea, or “heath tree”, and it’s prized in pipe making for its very high heat tolerance, respiration, hardness, and beautiful grain. Pipes can be made from corncob, meerschaum, olive wood, cherry wood, strawberry wood, ancient morta, clay, and perhaps other materials as well, but briar is considered to be the ultimate material for making pipes. Until then, don’t be discouraged by lackluster results… the David wasn’t Michelangelo’s first sculpture. Once you’ve mastered the basics, understand the general concepts of pipe making, and gotten a few pipes under your belt, then it’ll be time to start thinking about investing in tools that will significantly speed up the process and help you create a higher grade smoking instrument. You can shape a pipe from start to near finish with good files and rasps, (although it will test those burly arms of yours) and polish it off with some sandpaper. You can make a perfectly capable smoking pipe using tools that most of us already own, or could obtain for a relatively small investment a hand drill, dremel/rotary tool, and a good set of files and rasps will get you rollin’. There’s no reason to start worrying, however.
Though power tools are fun to use and make jobs like drilling the draught hole and chamber, shaping the stummel, and crafting the stem much easier tasks, its obvious that most fledgling pipe makers won’t have one or more of these tools at their disposal at the onset. Having some larger machinery including a lathe, a bandsaw, a drill press, and a benchtop disc sander makes the process shorter and infinitely easier. We speak from experience as we’ve tried both methods with much greater success in the latter.
There are manly men who can make smoking pipes using only sandpaper and hand tools, and then there are the rest of us.
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