Going to say something before an aggrieved veteran of the Open Airway War starts in...
Rick's first book, where the idea of making the airways of some pipes larger in diameter to improve their smoking performance, was a compilation of essays that were written for a club newsletter over a period of several years.
Because each essay was intended to be self-contained, whenever the airway question came up he re-explained the concept as a courtesy to readers who might be unfamiliar with it. (Also repeated was a clear caution that he was only writing about what HE had found to be true. That pipe smoking was practiced with enough variation that the benefits he'd discovered might not apply to others.)
An unintended result of mentioning those possible benefits of a larger-than-customary airway repeatedly in the same book was that the qualifiers were forgotten, and the repetition became the message. Human nature did the rest. Cries of, "We've been doing it wrong all along!" and "Bigger is better" were soon heard everywhere.
And the result of THAT was lots of kitchen table modifications by unpracticed hands. Meaning many pipes were either destroyed entirely, or their airways opened too far.
Then came the backlash. It was easiest, of course, to blame it all on Rick.
I was smoking and working on pipes long before all this happened, watched it unfold in realtime, and have had plenty of time to observe what came after.
Trust me when I say that you'd have to search a long time to find a pipe collector and smoker who was LESS inclined to tell people what to do, and MORE eager to help others find enjoyment in the hobby than Rick. He's a true gentleman in every way.
In hindsight, the entire drama could have been avoided by consolidating the first book's repeated mentions of airway opening, of course. A single chapter covering the subject would have sufficed. But who knew how many would "run" with the idea? No one could have guessed at the wild sales success of the book, either.
Anyway, there you go. Hopefully it's enough to pre-empt a fresh round of the Open Airway War here, in these comments, on this board. Rick deserves better than that. MUCH better.
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