Drilling on a Lathe

Drilling on a lathe is the practice of opening the three holes in a pipe body — the airway, the mortise, and the tobacco chamber — on a lathe rather than a drill press. The setup here is inverted from the usual: the drill bit stays put, and it's the wood that turns. This has one but decisive consequence: a hole can only be drilled at the piece's axis of rotation and nowhere else. The accuracy of alignment now depends less on the maker's eye than on how the block was mounted on the machine.

Mounting and Machine Setup

The briar block is first squared so all four faces are true; these true surfaces are what make every subsequent alignment easier. The intended shape is marked on the side of the block, with a line drawn for each of the three holes. The block is mounted in the headstock chuck; the drill bit is clamped into a drill chuck fitted to the tailstock, locked in place, and advanced toward the turning wood. The tailstock is, after all, a mechanism designed to carry drilling and reaming tools and advance them in a controlled way; its use in the pipe workshop is simply an extension of that.

Speed is set to the lowest gear. Low speed gives both a cleaner cut and reduces the hazard that comes from an inadequately secured block spinning at high speed. In this setup, the length that can be drilled is limited by whichever is shorter — the bit's length or the length of the machine bed; since the bed is usually longer than the bits, in practice the limit is set by the bit itself. This makes long-shanked designs that are hard to drill on a drill press, such as churchwarden models, accessible. The needed depth for each hole is marked on the bit's shank beforehand; because the bit doesn't rotate, this mark can be read easily during the work.

Opening the Three Holes

On a bent pipe, the first hole is the airway. Progress is slow; the bit is withdrawn frequently to clear chips and cool the tip, otherwise both the hole's interior surface scorches and the bit dulls prematurely. Where the bit meets a surface that isn't flat but angled, opening a flat starting face first with a short, stiff end mill is a common solution.

For the mortise, the block is remounted at the new angle. If the shank is to be turned, that work is finished before drilling, because drilled wood weakens, and a tool catching the wood and grabbing the piece at this stage becomes unrepairable damage. The face of the shank is trued with a Forstner bit wide enough to fully cover the shank's diameter; because a Forstner bit advances the cylindrical blade around its rim by cutting through the wood fibers, it leaves a flat-bottomed surface with a clean edge. The mortise itself, being a short hole relative to its diameter, is opened in a single pass.

The last hole is the tobacco chamber. Since the chamber's base needs to meet the airway exactly, the bit is stopped short of the marked line and checked before proceeding further. If desired, the chamber can be sanded while the block is still on the machine.

Inspection and the Changed Order for a Straight Pipe

The method's biggest practical payoff appears at this inspection stage. When the tailstock is slid back out of the way, you can look directly into the hole; on a drill press, the same check can only be done by holding it up to the light or by removing and examining the piece. Looking at the bottom of the mortise and seeing the airway centered means a pipe cleaner will pass through without catching. In sharply bent designs this centering doesn't always hold; in such cases the airway's mouth is given a slight bevel with a small burr to open a path for the cleaner.

On a straight pipe, since the airway and the mortise share the same axis, the block isn't remounted between the two, and so the order changes. Alignment is done once, the shank face is trued, the shank is turned if needed, and then the mortise is drilled first, followed by the airway. For where drilling fits within the overall process, see the how a pipe is made entry; for the names of the parts, see the pipe anatomy entry.