401. On The Road To Emerald City (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bend)
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENTS The X Pipe is now available at Smokingpipes.com. If you've read it, do consider leaving a review there or on your favorite forums and social media platforms. PSA: Last call for the Pete Geek Leather Pipe Rest! I can't get over the Celtic Shamrock--well done, Nate. (see end of post for ordering) ON THE ROAD TO EMERALD CITY (OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BEND) by D. H. Billings May 6th, 2024. I am (foolishly) working at the hospital for the 6th day in a row, and am excitedly awaiting two new pipes in the mail. One is a fat Radice reverse calabash (actually seen in Mark's April Fool's post) that my wife had bought for me as a combination graduation/wedding anniversary gift, and the other is a Peterson XL02 in the Emerald finish that I used some trade credit on. This latter pipe has some amazing rustication and a thicker shank than I'd seen on other XL02s in this finish, but one of the things that made this particular pipe stand out more than others is the band. It has a wider center with a paler green acrylic insert more akin to Burmese jade. It's clearly one of the leftovers from the previous incarnation of this line (something Mark discussed in his original post about the new Emerald pipes), and it simply speaks to me. The pipes arrive. I go home. The Radice is everything I hoped it would be, and the Peterson is even better than what the pictures had shown. The shaping of the bowl right to my liking, the rustication amazing and tactile, the stem delightfully thick, and the band beautifully subtle. There are a couple of things I realize that I may want to do and a couple of things that I absolutely must do in order to make the pipe just right for my personal preferences. Knowing the XL02 is the traditional version of the System 302, I'm unsure if I want to create a well similar to a System pipe - but that's something I can figure after I see how it smokes untampered. Beyond that, I am also unsure if I want to open up the airway; unlike System pipes, which start out at 5 mm at the tenon and taper down to 1 mm at the P-Lip, the stem on this pipe starts out at 3 mm. Again, something I can figure out after seeing how it smokes. As for the two things that I must do: I need to smooth out the chamferred tenon and I need to rebend the stem to my exact liking. But before I mess with the bend, I need to smoke the pipe so I can see if it's necessary to do anything at all with the drilling. I set out some Westminster that's as old as my daughter and I get to work on the tenon. I take my 1/2" countersink drill bit and - holding it…