Olivewood Tobacco Pipe

I was looking for a project to turn on the lathe and figured it would be a fun project to make a tobacco pipe. I ordered some Bethlehem olivewood online because I thought the grain pattern looked nice and for an infrequent smoke, it was apparently a good wood. 

Once I got it, I did some research on diameters and how to drill them out and realized I could probably make two pipes out of the block of wood I had. I cut the blanks and then cut the various holes the pipe needs. To round out the bottom, I initially drilled it out with various regular drill bits and then used a bullnose router bit in my drill press to plunge the remainder out and round the bottom. Then it was on to the lathe. Then the accidents happened.

I'm not good on a lathe and probably should have made some other items before trying something as complicated as this. The olivewood is very hard, the cutting required some cross grain turning, and there were knots in it. For a variety of reasons, I had both of the blanks I made blow up. One cut my knuckle up which is why the photos are in the washroom as I was washing off a little blood.

I was disappointed at this point, both because my hand hurt and because I thought the wood was wasted. However, after some thinking, I was determined to salvage one of them which still had the stem intact. I cut the chamber down and decided no more lathe. I finished shaping it on a sander.

I was ultimately happy with how it turned out. If I knew I was going to shape it on a sander from the start, I would have put more of an angle on the stem but it does work this way. The grain pattern once I put some linseed oil on it was amazing. Unfortunately I think the trauma of the initial explosion on the lathe weakened the wood so there was a small crack on the outside. This doesn't appear to hinder the function though. Lots of lessens learned!

I also used this opportunity to make a wooden box to hold the pipe and all of the accessories. Nothing fancy, just an oak box with rare earth magnets to hold the lid on. I had some soft shimmery blue fabric I used to wrap some foam I cut to shape.