Starting Out Pipemakng

[billh]

OK, this is my opinion as someone relatively new to professional making but having been an observer for a good number of years...

IMO A minority of new pipemakers are getting top results. Key things that determine the degree of success include:

knowledge of and experience with the pipes
patience
reedmaking ability
tool quality

(possibly in that order.)

Key tasks include long-hole boring, reamer making, reaming, and metalworking. For all of these tasks a metal lathe is superior. In the case of reamer and tool making, I would advise against anyone attempting to do this on a wood lathe (though it is no doubt possible, with modifications and determination). Lathe speeds of 100RPM or below are really needed. But I want to say no more about the metal-versus-wood issue, leaving it to the reader to decide, except to acknowledge that wood lathes are in general cheaper, and point out that a number of makers including Geoff Wooff use only one lathe - a metal lathe.

Other key tasks include tonehole boring and voicing and reeding. For these tasks no expensive tools are required beyond a simple drill press. Another key task is measurement; for this you will have to make many of your own tools. There's little point in madly reaming and boring if you can't measure what you've produced, to check it against your intentions.

Long-hole boring can be accomplished inexpensively and with excellent results using shopmade D bits (and lots of patience). This means that gun drills, while extremely useful, are optional, if you have a good setup for turning your own metal tools. Same goes for reamers; again, patience can substitute for the expense of a milling machine (my first reamers were cut in two by hand with a hacksaw, then hand-filed - a truly horrible job, but possible. Buy lots of blades if you try this, and set aside a couple of days.) Some people seem to get decent results with flat reamers ground from tool steel, but IMO they require a sensitivity and knack that few possess.

I advise against "making do". Too many compromises are likely to result in poor results. Many pipemaking tools must be made, not bought, anyhow, and even more *can* be made in the shop, if you have the basic complement of tools. Buying more tools is helpful but not strictly necessary. Tool steel and time may end up being your primary expenses!

I guess my must-have list would look something like this (price guesstimates for new equipment, except for the metal lathe which is used):

0) Good measurements of working instruments, and reference materials on lathe usage and pipemaking (SRS, DMQ CD-ROM) - 75 euro
1) metal lathe with hollow headstock, precision chuck, faceplate, live centre, and tailpost chuck - 500 to 1800 euro
2) measuring probes (made with lathe from Delrin rods) - materials cost 50 euro
3) selection of machinist's files - 25 euro
4) grinder (preferably a wet grinder - I recommend Tormek because of the jigs) - 200 euro
5) couple of basic hand-turning tools (bedan, gouge, parting tool), kept *very* sharp; you can actually make these from tool stock if you like - 20 to 75 euro
6) couple of short pieces of high-quality square tool steel stock for making cutting tools - 10 euro
7) 'silver steel' rods in appropriate diameters for making reamers, d bits, etc. - and Bright Mild steel for mandrels (don't use BMS for reamers) - 80 euro
8) sheet brass in about 0.7 and 1.0mm thickness - 30 euro
9) simple drill press with selection of bits for boring toneholes (you can make these bits on the lathe, ideally, or purchase lip-and-spur bits for drilling undersize plus short twist bits for getting closer to the final diameters) - 70 euro
10) bench vise (you can make hardwood jaws for it - ?
11) propane/butane torch and silver solder - 20 euro
12) saw (a hand saw with fine blade will do) - 25 euro
13) fine needle files for tonehole finishing and voicing - 20 euro
14) suitable reed cane and hardwood - ?

The lathe is most of the expense unless you get lucky and pick up a used Southbend/Boxford/etc. for a bargain. Used Myfords tend to command a better price. (A new chinese cheap lathe could serve, but my understanding is that considerable effort can be required to get such a lathe up to spec, motor needs replacing and things need shimming, etc. - a job for someone with previous experience)

Bottom line seems to be that the tooling cost could be kept under 1000 (euro or dollars, since tools are cheaper in the US) - with lots of toolmaking effort. Where hand tools are concerned, especially, I'd recommend buying the better grade and not trying to save 5/10 euro/dollars here and there by buying junk.

Lastly, you need loads of patience, determination, and an eye for detail. That's the stuff you can't buy...

Bill

[reedman]

The thing is to day is, you can buy and obtain quality materials & metals already prepared for the job, long boring drills, hardened ground flat bar steel, 3.5mm-4mm-5mm-in thickness, 15mm in width, in thirty inch lengths for £8-£9, makes lovely double edge flat tapered cutting reamers, batches of drills and bits can can be taking for sharpening and facing at local engineering shops for little exspence and machined up by a professional for £10-£20, some of my flat bar reamers I have made make as lovely a job as good as my four fluted tapered cutting reamers on chanters bores, which where professional made and pricey, I can't really see any need for a metal work lathe, mind you,the bench grinder is a very handy tool, my opinion is, a pipemaker none professional or professional is only as good as the pipemaker or persons who trains him, do you hounestly think the pipemakers of old, if they had the materials we have today already made to use, would'nt be useing it, "do the traditional pipemakers of today use treadal lathes!," why not? that the tradional way isn't it?. from what I seen they seem to just apply the bits they like, in my opinion tradional pipemaking don't mean good pipes. what makes great pipes! is the person holding the chisel & his or hers experience along with a mark of there craftsmanship. thats my opinion, but everyone to there own.all the best.

[J-dub]

Ah, to choose a wood lathe or a metal lathe, if one had to make the choice. Personaly, I have both so I don't have to make that choice, but If I did have to, I would squarly choose to keep my metal lathe (trusty old heavy-duty Logan 11"). In fact I am always on the look out for another quality old metal lathe to replace the wood lathe. I would increase the top-end speed on that sucker for finish work and such. My newer model wood lathe (Jet) took subtantial modification to make it even useable for the ornamental turning work of pipe building, let alone the precision work like long hole boring.

Apart form the ability to make conical reamers on the metal lathe, I find a need for turning metal on a regular basis, like when I need to make capsains for a pipe bender to make the bass drone bends - I simply did it! Or when I wanted to make a heavt-duty 5C collet chuck for my wood lathe I just made one (in this case it was far from a simple matter, but impossible without the metal lathe). So one should look beyond reamer making, the ability to cut metal is extremely useful one in this endeavor.

One thing that the prospective pipe builder shopping for a lathe should consider is that Metal lathes are built so much more substatially than even the best wood lathes, and to a much higher degree of quality and precision. You should also expect the sale of any quality new or used lathe to include substantial tooling that either does not come with your typical wood lathe, or is not even available. In which case you will need to make it youself (time is money). A steady rest is a good example of an item that is standard with a metal lathe, but not even available for wood lathes in general. Three and four jaw chucks are another example. A good metal lathe is likely to cost you more up front than a suitable wood lathe, but after you figure in the extra work and parts you will need the two may not be so different in price anymore.

It is possible to get a wood lathe (or something that looks like one, but does not really work well, there is a lot a crap out there) for apparently little mullah. But even in the best of circumstances I think that you will find that you will need to make a substantial number of improvements to said lathe to get it aligned for drilling. In the worst case it might prove to be useless. I have seen several cheapo wood lathes that look superficially similar to the Jet (these are all copies of the older Delta/Rockwell wood lathe that was much more substantially built) but on closer examination were complete crap; tremendous play in the bearings, bed and ways were so piss-poor that they were visibley not flat. No amount of work would make this into something that you could make qaulity pipes with, regardless of skill.

Please don't take offense Reedman, I can see where you are coming from. You can make a good wood lathe work for pipe building, and I'm sure you are not the only one who does. I just don't think that one should over look a metal lathe as only something that is useful if you are going to make reamers on it. My background is a technical one (scientific, engineering) so I am comfortable with operating a metal lathe, I realize others may not find them as friendly as I do. Metal lathes are far from simple if you have never operated one, and evaluating the quality of a used one is difficult if you don't know what to look for.

[quote="elmek"]Any makers professional, amateur or otherwise like to list out what they have in the way of lathes and machinery - what they class as essential and what just makes pipemaking easier - would seem a useful thing to do as I am sure there are quite a few budding makers on the forum who are wondering just how much they need to spend to set up a workshop.[quote]

Since this topic has been raised here, I thought that I might add that I am preparing an article for the "Piper's Review" on just this issue. I was trying to get it in for the Summer edition, but I'm afraid I will have to tell Wally that we need to shoot for the fall edition instead. I hope that this article will answer some folks questions about evaluating, setting up and operating a lathe suitable for pipe making. I was just going to focus on the metal lathe, since this is what I have the most experience with in terms of pipemaking, but if any of you wood lathe users have any thing to contribute in terms of what you had to do to make a wood lathe work for you I would gladly consider adding that info to the article if you like. Please let me know, obviously I think there are more than a small handful of people interested in this topic!


[quote="reedman"]do you hounestly think the pipemakers of old, if they had the materials we have today already made to use, would'nt be useing it, "do the traditional pipemakers of today use treadal lathes!," why not? [quote]

Ah, what excatly did the old master pipe makers use ito make such exquisite pipes back in the day? Now that is an interesting question I have been pondering recently. The treadle lathe certainly was common in those days, but did they have access to something more high-tech? I have come accross references to instrument builders in the UK during that era using Holtzappel and Rose ornamental turnining lathes to produce instruments, but no reference to union pipe makers as such. Could they have afforded such elaborate and technically cutting-edge machines for union pipe making? If anyone has anything to add on this subject I would be most grateful.

~John

[hog_eye_man]

I have Boxford CUD and Union Graduate lathes. Julian Goodacre recommended the Graduate. It makes all the difference having both a metal lathe and a wood lathe! When I was a kid I had a Wadkin Bursgreen pattern maker's lathe which was a wood lathe with a saddle and cross slide on a 48" bed. Its owner reclaimed it and sent it to Croatia for the war effort. I think it would have been the perfect woodwind making machine. Then I have a big drill press. Oh,and I have to blag the use of a milling machine sometimes! Thats all the machine tools I need. I suggest that a beginner should get the sturdiest wood lathe they can afford, and track down a quality metal lathe that they can get the use of.

[reedman]

Cheers for the info John, pipemaking is a craft, you just don't need heavey steardy metal lathes to make pipes, I will admitt a metal work lathe is handy for cutting regulators key ways with a milling attachment, but any engineering shop will make you a steady post for any wood lathe from £40-£60, I centre bore my chanter blanks out on my coronet woodturning lathe and the run out is no more than 0.50mm, but were turning wood here, the reamers will correct any slight bore error, were not making parts for NASA, all most pipers would really like to do is make them selves a chanter or a half set of pipes, some wood turning classes would be helpful to a beginner, anyone wanting to go pro, would then will need to some training with a pipemaker. but a work shop could be fitted out for a few hundred pounds if you shop around for real bargains, when I first started making pipes I use a record DLM24 woodturning lathe cost me second hand £50 a bargain it was, I made some great chanters on that lathe.and that was also the same make of lathe I was taught on at the wood craft college were I trained in woodturning for two years, I dont use the tail stock for boring chanter blanks when there set up in the steady post, and yes you can make pipes on a lathe like this with some training, I know, because the chanter I play on was made on a lathe like this, all the best.

Here is a record DML24, I'm not to keen on the chuck tho.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Record-Power-Wood ... dZViewItem

[Mike Hulme]

I started messing around with wood lathes many years ago, using one to turn a stick for a violin bow. I ruined quite a few pieces of expensive Pernambuco before I managed to get one decent stick. That was a wood lathe, and as a violin maker I have plenty of experience with using edge tools. A few months ago I bought a Myford ML7 screwcutting lathe, not particularly to makes pipes, but a friend and I make model engines. It came with a host of accessories, including milling attachments, three ornamental vertical and horizontal cutting frames, indexing plates, eccentric and rectilinear chucks, and so much tooling that I will not need to buy any more - ever! It even had a genuine Myford wood turning rest! I have just taper turned another bow stick on the Myford, it came out perfect first time, and I could even mill out he mortice, and drill out the bow screw hole without removing the stick from the hollow headstock. I could not have done that on a wood lathe.

When I started reading the masses of books on ornamental turning that came with it, I realised that the ornate mounts on some sets of pipes - especially GHBs - could only have been made using the equipment that I have. Chris Bayley has given me some invaluable information on what you can actually do with a metal lathe, and I could now even make my own tools if I ever wanted to get into pipemaking.

Oh, and the whole kit and caboodle cost me £350 - about $700 US.

[rorybbellows]

In the TV documentory about Kevin O,Reilly who of course learned from Geoff Wooff ,it seems he doesn,t use any traditional woodturning at all .The blocks are turned on a metal lathe with metal bits and the block are rounded over with a file !!
I think its fair to say that Geoff must do it this way as well !!

RORY

[johnpipe108]

First, as to the lathes the Taylor's used; it was the age of steam and water power,and I'm aware that quite a few machine shops in the mid nineteenth century ran by these sources, driving an overhead counter-shaft to provide power to all the machines in the shop. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. has several examples, including a complete machine shop. So it's possible that the Taylor's used powered lathes (I once read an old turning book by an English professional turner, and they used to use the wood shavings for fuel for the boiler that powered their shop's steam engine ).

As to drills, D bits are the general way to go for sure, but I just made an experimental improvement to one of my old 9/64" long-boy twist bits that makes it behave nearly as well:



I ground the end of the drill like a gun drill, grinding it almost tangent to the grinding wheel, then made symmetrical reliefs to the right and left faces, so it only cuts on the left end. Works nicely in a test bore through about a 3-1/2" length of oak cylinder:



The drill came out within a hair off center, and entirely within the 3/16" 60-degree CS hole at the inboard end.

regards, John

[reedman]

Hello john, I like your design, I also use long twist drills, with no problem at all.

Specially for the metal work lathe guys, this is how you turn them out, just scroll down the first page.

http://www.cuillinn.com/making.html

http://www.bcpipes.com/shop05.html

[reedman]

This might give some idea's of what sort of lathe, early pipe makers of the 1800' may have used to make there pipes. all the best.

http://www.americanartifacts.com/smma/barnes/b7.htm

http://www.americanartifacts.com/smma/barnes/b10.htm

http://www.americanartifacts.com/smma/advert/ay223.htm

http://www.americanartifacts.com/smma/advert/ax30.htm

http://www.americanartifacts.com/smma/advert/ax27.htm

[billh]

More likely the lathes were also fitted with slide rests or toolposts, etc., i.e not so primitive as some of these examples. (A couple of your examples - for instance the second one - appear to have slide rests and metal bed/ways, and so would have been suitable for metal turning as well as wood turning.)

The state of the art of 19th century lathes was very advanced (while, of course simple 'country' lathes also existed outside of urban manufacturing centres). While pipemakers would not in general have had access to luxurious ornamental turning lathes, they nonetheless would have been familiar with advanced wood and metal turning techniques and probably ornamental turning techniques as well. Then as now, engineers and artisans on a limited budget would have had recourse to making their own tools and attachments for specialized lathe work. Many of the treadle lathes of the time were used not only for wood turning but also for metal turning, and were kitted out accordingly.

Here are a couple of other late 18th century / early 19th century lathes, and a great photo at the bottom of a late-19th century lathe and its operator:

http://www.ingenious.org.uk/media/4.0_S ... 7418_3.jpg
(1768)
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepage ... ltzros.jpg (1838)
http://www.turners.org/images/munro.gif
http://www.ashburton.co.nz/lynnhistoric ... lathe2.jpg
http://www.turners.org/images/Shop1.gif

As for the Taylors, since there was only Charles and Billy, I doubt that the practicalities or economics of steam or water power would have made sense for them in the 1870's and '80's - the steam engines of the time were still pretty bulky, small ones didn't come in until the late 1880's. The steam and water powered mills and machine shops were generally big ones employing lots of people. Of course it's possible that their shop was located on a stream, but IIRC the location of their shop is known to be on a Philadelphia urban street - seems unlikely. And of course the Taylors seem to have done less woodturning than your average pipemakers and more machining/carving

Bill

[reedman]

Hello Bill,I think those lathes were more for the clock & instrument makers of the time and would have been very exspencive for the pipemaker, the woodturners and pipemakers of there day would have worked on nothing more than a decent quality woodturning lathe modified for the job, and even then a woodturning lathe would have been very expensive, I would have thought on average this lathe or something similar would have been a favorite amongst pipemaker of that day, tapered wood chucks on face plates and home made steady posts could quite easily be made for the job with little expence, I've seen some very nice turning done on a poll lathe which can be made very cheaply, life was tough in Ireland, life was shorter & slower, but they still had to pay the rent & bills and feed there family by what ever means. making a reasonable income would have been a god send for a any pipemaker of there time no matter were there lived, with long hours of work by candle or lamp light. all the best.

http://www.americanartifacts.com/smma/barnes/b7.htm

[reedman]

These might be handy for any of the new pipemakers workshop, there 6"inches long but still handy for the price, they'll need refacing tho for wood, the others drills are 12"inches long and are 3.25mm in width,all the best.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/EXTENSION-DRILLS- ... dZViewItem

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/AIRCRAFT-EXTENSIO ... dZViewItem

[billh]

Too short for most pipemaking work. ("approx. 6 inches").

If you want to browse eBay look for used gun drills, I hear they come up for sale. However, they may not have the correct profile/relief for boring wood.

BTW I have recently received evidence, photographic and otherwise (though I can't reveal details, since the information is pending publication) that at least some of the early pipemakers use ornamental turning gear and likewise that their lathes more akin to metalworking/dual-purpose lathes than simple wood lathes - i.e. metal or metal-clad ways, toolposts etc. This of course may not have been true of all makers, and of course few if any makers would not have been able to afford a top-of-the-line OT lathe. but certainly the Kennas and Coynes didn't hack these things out with bent soupspoons

ATB

Bill

[reedman]

I totally agree Bill, but as in every trade,you have good makers and great makers, some people are just born with that magic touch no matter what tools they use like, Kenna, Coyne, Harrington. all the best.