Ronni Bikacsan

Ronni Bikacsan is a pipe repair and restoration craftsman working under the name NightOwl Pipe Works in Nashville, Tennessee. Within the community he is known both for bringing broken pipes back to life and for a practice called "blueprinting" — re-dimensioning a finished pipe's smoke channel from end to end.

Path Into the Craft

Before entering the pipe trade, he worked in engineering and measurement instrumentation, electronics, custom automobile fabrication, and antique clock repair; he says this background, rooted in precision measurement and fine mechanical work, carries over directly into his shop practice. In Nashville he spent a period working alongside pipemaker Jody Davis, who later relocated to Yuma, Arizona. The principle he drew from that period is simple: smoke should travel through a single channel whose cross-section stays constant from the bottom of the chamber to the bit. Three practical consequences follow from this principle: the bore diameter must be considered together with the chamber diameter, no steps or gaps should interrupt the path, and the cross-section must be preserved all the way to the slot in the mouthpiece. The broader industry debate on this subject is covered in the airflow entry.

Where the Flow Bottlenecks

By his own measurements, a pipe's bottleneck is most often located not in the shank but in the final section of the mouthpiece. A shank bored to 4 millimeters may feed into a bit that narrows to 2.5 millimeters, with no taper toward the bite point, and there may also be an unmeasured air gap between the mortise and the tenon. He traces the source of wet smoking and hard draw largely to a combination of these three flaws.

The Blueprinting Method

The procedure he applies can be summarized in three steps, using pipe anatomy terminology:

• The shank bore is taken as 4 millimeters, and the rest of the channel is set to that measurement.

• The gap between the mortise and tenon is closed with a Delrin or ebonite (vulcanite) sleeve bored to 4 millimeters. The end of the sleeve facing the mortise is given a slight taper so it aligns with the shank bore; if the hole is off-center, the taper is angled accordingly.

• The mouthpiece is bored to 3.5 millimeters as far as the cross-section allows; if there isn't enough material left in the final section, it drops to 3 millimeters. The slot is hand-filed back from the bite point, so the cross-section transitions from round to oval and then to the slot.

To soften the step in flow created by the change in diameter, he notes that he sharpens his drill bits to a more acute 60-degree angle. The same principles apply to bent pipes, but because the angle in the channel must also be smoothed, each pipe calls for its own solution, and the outcome is less predictable than with straight pipes. The measurements given here are not an industry standard, but the craftsman's own account of his practice.

Repair Solutions

Rather than banding a cracked shank, he fits a Delrin sleeve into the mortise with epoxy and runs a stainless-steel tube through it to the tenon, so the cracked area is reinforced from the inside rather than the outside. If part of the shank has broken off and is missing, the piece is cut away on a lathe and replaced with exotic wood, antler, Corian, horn, or bamboo, with the joint again reinforced by the steel tube. Custom inlaid mouthpieces and bamboo shank extensions are also among his work. This approach is considered a repair philosophy that returns estate pipes waiting in a drawer to active use. For general properties of the stem and mouthpiece materials he works with, see mouthpiece materials; for the limits of what can be done at home, see pipe repair and mouthpiece care.

The article in which he describes his method was published in The Pipe Collector, the bulletin of the North American Society of Pipe Collectors (NASPC), at the request of Bill Unger, who edited the bulletin for many years. He has also appeared as a guest on Brian Levine's Pipes Magazine Radio Show. According to reports, the shop is not currently taking new work.