Dunhill's arrive

Well the horn stemmed Dunhill Ring Grain Billiard arrived the other day and it is drop dead gorgeous, the only thing I was truly shocked over was the hard rubber insert used to mate the bowl with the stem had a hole approximately 1.5 mm which made one the color of Barney, i.e. purple, when trying to draw. I took out my 4 mm drill bit and performed surgery and it is now wide ope and the hole mates perfectly with the one in the horn stem, makes me wonder how Dunhill's QC didn't catch this but at least I made it right.

Today Richard Dunhill's Shell Billiard pipe arrived and it too is drop dead gorgeous and I was once again flabbergasted in that they built it with the Inner Tube Insert and in 1988 no less, must have been due to the fact the pipe was destined for Richard Dunhill, makes it that much sweeter!

I love the feel, I've owned a horn stemmed cob for a long time and one by Paulo Becker the feel reminds me of the older rubber stems from the teen's, I don't clench the stem but rather the teeth on the opposite side of my jaw thus allowing the stem to sit and hang lightly so I don't tend to chew up stems, unless they are those plastic abominations that come on cobs which I happily replace with Forever Stem's.

mso489,

It's all relative mate, I was a troubleshooter and have had to make immediate design repairs on the fly for the reactor vessel rod insert and removal mechanism power to salvage a $24.5 M submarine refueling job, or removing an onboard PC with 90' of umbilical to perform repairs from a CNC Center, so taking my drill to my Dunhill took less time than slamming the drill into the chuck to lock and load!

The hard rubber makes up the mating end to the bowl from the stem, i.e. I doubt one could form the horn stem to fit so they used hard rubber for the transition.
The CNC Center (Computerized Numerical Control) is a high tech machining station where you place a rough piece of material, i.e. metal, plastic, teflon etc. and with the use of a program on mylar tape you get a finished product. In this particular center the onboard PC, i.e. an internal PC that interfaces to compute what the tooling and fixture does during the machining operation, is attached to the center via 90' of umbilical which is fragile to say the least but in order to troubleshoot and repair what is wrong one must get into the front center console, remove it then take the PC out unwinding the umbilical, make your repairs then rewind it so it all fits together and works again.
Other fun things I've done is make terminal splices to fiber optic interface from a hard drive to the onboard PC in a robotic welder which we used to weld metal sheets to the reactor vessel, the welders who do this use joysticks and PC monitors to guide the robot, I was the lucky guy that did the calibration on the welding unit which took 6 hours and you only had +/- .7 Volt DC to work with anything over, or under you started all over, I do miss those days. :D

banjo
p.s. Glowing is great for reading w/o turning the lights on at night.