I don’t know if you all are familiar with Mr. Rodger’s (Hello neighbor!), but my little girl was watching an old rerun the other day. The mailman on the show was visiting a trumpet factory (that is TRUMPET not strumpet) and I thought I would see a very complicated machine doing all those bends in a trumpet. I was amazed to see an old guy next to what looked like a chest freezer. He was pouring soapy water into the the brass tubes, putting the tubes down into the freezer unit and then hand bending them on a little steel jig/tubing bender. No lead, no sand, no wax, just soapy ice. I was thinking that this guy could turn out all the turns for all the pipemakers in the world by working 3 days a year. So I am just passing on the info to all you budding pipemakers out there in Chipple land.
You won’t see THAT on teletubbies. Did you see the one where they went to the toilet factory?
The important thing is that it was an old guy making them. What show out there isn’t better with a grumpy old guy making stuff. I recently saw a hot rod show featuring a four foot tall, cigar smokin’ 80-year-old lead worker who was busy telling every one within ear shot that they didn’t understand “old school” craft. It doesn’t get any better than that.
That reminds me of the dirty old man who ran the materials lab back in school, God rest his smutty soul. One semester they let him teach the Materials course. What more fun could an 85 year old man have than to spend 4 hours a week lecturing to kids in their early 20’s about they just don’t make refrigerators like they used to. “The Studebaker - now that was an otta-mow-beel”.
It’s a longer story than I have time for (or you have interest in reading) but this story about the “soapy ice” reminds me of my visit to a little family-owned factory in Billerica, Massachusetts. I was in the Navy, and my job was to acquire a very small piece of waveguide which was used on a radar transceiver on a nuclear sub.
I was amazed at the simplicity of how they bent a 1" wide piece of brass (square) tubing. And yes, the requisite “old guy” was there, doing the actual work.
So I am just passing on the info to all you budding pipemakers out there in Chipple land.
