Smooth Reverse Calabash Double Acorn Tobacco Pipe

Want to make things easier on yourself? Assuming you were a pipemaker, pick the straight Poker as your signature shape. Get drilling, engineering, and proportions down right once, and thereafter you could let a particular lathe set-up do half the work. If you want to make things challenging, however, do what Sam Cui has done, and pick a signature shape that's organic, unusual, requires extra engineering, and possesses an external form for which a lathe would be no help at all, because its very nature requires a great deal of careful hand-shaping.

Just be warned that unless you're as talented and dedicated as Sam clearly is, you'll probably just make a mess. Sam did not make a mess. Sam made a beautiful and distinctive form with neat little details like that ever-so-slight step of the stem (adding a just-right crisp touch of definition to design that is, in every other respect, continuously smooth), a finely engineered reverse-Calabash smoking instrument, and a very nice way to show off some impressively grained briar, all in one.

- Eric N. Squires