Burning Tobacco in Wider Bowls.

[cigrmaster]

I could get a 2 inch bowl and it would smoke fine as ong as I pack it right. When I smoked Castello pipes they were mostly 7/8 with shank dimension of 4.5 or better. Most were over 2 inches tall and 1.75 deep so I would pack it real tight and it smoked perfectly.

Once you get to know a pipe, you will learn it's sweets spots and then you will get a consistent smoke every time. It takes practice and patience, pipe smoking is not for people who have no patience. You have to put in the research and work and continue to figure out what works for you.
Just a couple of weeks or so ago I had 2 shitty smokes in a row. I quickly figured out I was not packing my pipe tight enough there bye my pipe kept going out because of a loose pack. Even after all these years I got lazy and didn't check the draw before lighting up. I won't for that again for at least another decade.

 

[crashthegrey]

Volume has nothing to do with it. If you stack a wood in a way that can make a half cord of wood burn for longer than a whole cord burned at once.
View attachment 175805.

Cigars, think about a 6" lancero. It will burn for longer than a Robusto of the same length. Volume has nothing to do with it.

Hmmm, that is a fair point. I did not think of it that way.

 

[Chasing Embers]

Hmmm, that is a fair point. I did not think of it that way.

Still sounds speculative with the difference of surface area exposed to oxygen between cigars and pipes. The arrangement of a cigar's filter could correspond to packing a pipe with a folded flake and the burn rate with that sort of packing may attribute to the similar burn rate but with ribbon there's much more there in a larger chamber and the burning is erratic compared to the steady burn of the thicker fibered flake.

 

[tmcg81]

I only have one fairly wide bowl and it's probably around .90 diameter. I happen to smoke English blends in it, but when I got it all I smoked were English blends and it just kinda worked out that way. I occasionally will have a bowl kinda crater and burn a little quicker in the center. A couple of tamps and I'm generally back in business. I've kinda gone back and forth on chamber size making a massive difference on a smoke. Because for every time the idea that a taller more narrow bowl is better for Virginia flakes and a wide shallow bowl is better for English blends is proven correctly to me, I've had incredible smokes out of bowls that according to conventional wisdom should not have occurred. Pipe smoking is weird, man.

 

[Briar Lee]

I see many prefer wider bowls, and especially for english, mixtures blends. But I have a question, about how well the smoke burns in a wider bowl. Let's say for example in bowls with 23mm(0.90") diameter. It is true that in larger diameter bowls, it is difficult to keep the tobacco lit? Maybe tobacco burns only in the center? Or chamber depth also play role with that? What is your experience?

All day long I smoke Lees that hold maybe 2 or 3 grams at most of tobacco.

Over the last fifty years I’ve learned just how to do that and enjoy the experience, but small pipes simply aren’t as good as large ones.

My best smokers are huge pipes, mainly Danish freehands, that gobble up a two ounce can of tobacco in only a few smokes.

The flavor of pipe tobacco comes from releasing the oils at the lowest temperature possible, and it’s easier to do that with lots of tobacco in the chamber.