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.