Homemade clay pipes.

Dug the clay from the river (mixed with other clay for the top two), sculpted by hand, used a straw to make the hole, burnished with the back of a spoon, and fired in my BBQ.

fuck yeah man, its awesome.

That's dope, Keep it up!

3 more.

Primitive......but functional. And u can't beat the price. Nice job!

Genius! Would you mind sharing how long you fired it for and what kind of clay you mixed it with?

Fucking killer idea man, BBQ kiln, holy shit.

Old Mate Gorks said:

Genius! Would you mind sharing how long you fired it for and what kind of clay you mixed it with?

Fucking killer idea man, BBQ kiln, holy shit.

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Just natural clay from the hobby store instead of the really, really natural clay from the river. Has to be natural clay though, not one of the plastic or oil based clays. Just regular natural clay like potters use, nothing special, can sometimes get it cheap at colleges. The storebought is a lot smoother, so I'm thinking I may want to try making a slurry and seeing if I can get the larger bits to settle out a bit more with the riverbank stuff.
As to how long, I just covered them in charcoal, lit it and left it until the coals burned themselves out and cooled. So from a few hours to several. If you look close (because most of your piece should be covered), the clay gets hot enough to actually glow. Since the fire is pretty small, stick to small simple pieces, anything large and you'd need a real pit or kiln.

Going to try something a bit fancier next time, wish me luck.

Leonardo de Garden said:

Just natural clay from the hobby store instead of the really, really natural clay from the river. Has to be natural clay though, not one of the plastic or oil based clays. Just regular natural clay like potters use, nothing special, can sometimes get it cheap at colleges. The storebought is a lot smoother, so I'm thinking I may want to try making a slurry and seeing if I can get the larger bits to settle out a bit more with the riverbank stuff.
As to how long, I just covered them in charcoal, lit it and left it until the coals burned themselves out and cooled. So from a few hours to several. If you look close (because most of your piece should be covered), the clay gets hot enough to actually glow. Since the fire is pretty small, stick to small simple pieces, anything large and you'd need a real pit or kiln.

Going to try something a bit fancier next time, wish me luck.

Click to expand...

Beautiful, thank you very much for that, I'll be sure to give it a go as soon as I can get my hands on some decent clay. I wish I hadn't graduated uni, could have pinched a bit from the ceramics dept. haha, ah well.

Yeah good luck man, keen to see how it all goes.

Clay pipe (painted).

I have a small plumbing related buisness I run on the side and several years ago I worked for a guy who, while I was there, I noticed had alot of Native American artifacts around the house(arrow heads, hammer stones, mortar & pestal, ect) Anyhow I started asking questions about them and it turned out that the farm he lived on had once had a Indian village on it. To shorten a long story, he told me that what he really enjoyed was the challenge of finding the clay pipes that were on the site. He went out to his barn and came back with a shoebox that was overflowing with clay pipes. I'd never seen anything like it from around here. He told me that he didn't even bother with picking up pipes that were broken in any way and he still must have had 50 or 75 in that box. Most looked very similar to the bottom pipe in the first pic you posted here. Looking back, I should had added 1 pipe to the bill when I wrote it up that day. That would have been a really nice pipe to smoke out of, considering the history of the piece.

droopy107 said:

...Most looked very similar to the bottom pipe in the first pic you posted here. Looking back, I should had added 1 pipe to the bill when I wrote it up that day. That would have been a really nice pipe to smoke out of, considering the history of the piece.

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Oh man, now wouldn't that be a sweet piece to have!