Anyone Have A Good / Great Experience with an AliExpress Pipe?

[workman]

I got almost this exact set (from the same company) for my Birthday from my mother in law. I sanded and scrubbed out the blue-grey bowl coating and cleaned the internals (they were full of mystery dust). The wood is very dense and heavy, it is definitely not the advertised "pear wood." Wrong color and grain structure under the coating. I gave the chamber a light coating with a swab of diluted honey and an activated charcoal capsule. The stem is very plastic. It clenched easily, good balance for its weight, and smoked great, until about half way down when everything got hot, and it smelled and tasted a bit bad, like smouldering cardboard and communism. I dumped the rest of the bowl.

I think with a little more protective cake it would be a decent smoker, at least I hope it will, as I will be expected to smoke it at least a few times around her haha.

It tasted a bit bad, like smouldering cardboard and communism ?

Sounds bleak!

 

[cosmicfolklore]

It's not that Chinese are incompetent: the issue is dumping: flooding the market with dirt cheap goods, even if they lose money on the manufacturing, in order to wipe out the competition and make everyone beholden and dependent on China.

When my oldest daughter was in elementary school, one of her best friends was Chinese. Her mother was getting ready for a two week trip to visit family back in china, and we had been talking about Chinese manufacturing. She asked me to give her something that I thought would be hard to make, so I searched the house and grabbed an ugly music box that was wood with carvings, but had a ceramic display of a dancer on the inside with some pretty intricate mechanicals that made some neat music. It was just the first thing I saw. I didn't really even like it. My Grandmother had bought it years ago, and I wasn't sure what she was going to do with it. But, because it had so many different materials... it looked complicated to me.

After two weeks in China, she returned, and brought me a huge box full of exact duplicates, maybe two dozen of them. I was impressed, and I had a hard time telling which one was the original. But, then she tried to tell me how much I owed her for her uncle having re-geared his whole factory to make these, and that a thousand of them were on their way to me. I was like... ummm... I have no use for a thousand of those things. I wasn't even aware that she was going to have so many made. They were perfect, even the hand carved parts... but, I didn't feel obligated to buy them. She got really angry, and we never spoke again, but I was impressed. But, i wasn't in the business of selling ugly music boxes, so... I think that I may have told this story before on here. Hmmmm...

 

[olkofri]

When my oldest daughter was in elementary school, one of her best friends was Chinese. Her mother was getting ready for a two week trip to visit family back in china, and we had been talking about Chinese manufacturing. She asked me to give her something that I thought would be hard to make, so I searched the house and grabbed an ugly music box that was wood with carvings, but had a ceramic display of a dancer on the inside with some pretty intricate mechanicals that made some neat music. It was just the first thing I saw. I didn't really even like it. My Grandmother had bought it years ago, and I wasn't sure what she was going to do with it. But, because it had so many different materials... it looked complicated to me.

After two weeks in China, she returned, and brought me a huge box full of exact duplicates, maybe two dozen of them. I was impressed, and I had a hard time telling which one was the original. But, then she tried to tell me how much I owed her for her uncle having re-geared his whole factory to make these, and that a thousand of them were on their way to me. I was like... ummm... I have no use for a thousand of those things. I wasn't even aware that she was going to have so many made. They were perfect, even the hand carved parts... but, I didn't feel obligated to buy them. She got really angry, and we never spoke again, but I was impressed. But, i wasn't in the business of selling ugly music boxes, so... I think that I may have told this story before on here. Hmmmm...

You shoulda given here a corn cob pipe! You'd be raking in the dollars now. ?

 

[mikethompson]

Nice story cosmic, never heard that one before!