on the thread about "Shapes You're On The Fence About," you listed the poker as one you
didn't like, and now look at what you've made!
I knew someone was going to bust me on this one...
What I should have said is I hate boring pokers...which many of them are. On this particular combination- using a high tech material like carbon fiber, I needed a shape with hard angular forms....like the poker...The cool thing is that I can shift the shape to a billiard...or take a billiard shape and extend the shank and have a Canadian...or throw in some ivory spacers on the front and rear to dress it up...
What I love about this combination is that it has that big internal space in the shank- we can argue whether that's a reverse calabash or a riff on a Peterson System pipe...but the beauty is that it breaks into 3 pieces- stummel, shank and stem so you can clean it very easily....and the carbon fiber is dimensionally stable in temperatures up to 350 degrees...
It is very much an experiment at this point...but a very interesting one...
...and to give props to genesis for the idea- at the Chicago Show, Joao Reis had a pipe with an impossibly small bamboo shank and he was kind enough to share that he was using carbon fiber for the tenon- got me thinking along those lines....
