I broke my new Radice in nicely and carefully but I am still trying to get use to the wide open draw and very small button. Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
It is the pipe shown above.
The Radice you just bought, you’re saying you broke it in, in one day?
It’s always been my understanding even from professional carvers, a break in, is when you’ve achieved a 1 millimeter layer of carbon through out the chamber. It’s impossible to achieve this in one day, briar is to dense.
Of course pipes can smoke great from the first smoke and onwards.
I actually have one Radice, maybe you’ve seen it, my Rind Straight, it’s 2 years old, and by this standard, it’s still not broken in after 2 years. It still hasn’t reached the thickness of 1 millimeter, and where it has built up, it’s also only in 50% of the chamber. This briar is really stubborn to build up the carbon but it still smokes great.
My other Radice you might of seen, my Clear bent Dublin with Baldi Baldi briar, that’s aged over 20 years, I’ve had it 6 months, and it’s also no where near a 1 millimeter layer too.
Professional carvers have told me, until you build this 1 millimeter layer, you want to smoke the pipe easy and not hot, so as to not risk cracks in the chamber, and burn out. So even though a pipe smokes great before a 1 millimeter layer has formed through out, in nice pipes someone cares about, this is also about protection.
But, I have also experienced if you smoke a new pipe before the carbon layer build up, to fast and hot, it can mess up the smoking quality of the pipes. But if someone didn’t push it to hard, with a good cleaning and rest it can come around ok, but for me, I spent several months once to get a pipe back performing nicely after I pushed it to hard.
