Description

Gyrosmoke Dichro Vortex Glass Chillum

Sparkle, Color, Sparkle, Color, Sparkle and repeat. From head to mouthpiece, your descent into the dichro vortex happens everytime you gaze into the colorful depths.

Functional

Fabricated with specially licensed imagery from dichro maker CBS, the Gyrosmoke Dichro Vortex Glass Chillum is one of several unique images made in the late 90’s. These images helped launch Dichromatic Glass from the rigid confines of military specification and into the fluid creativity of glass pipe functional art.

Fabricated with 1/4″ wide dichro cane, the  uses Dichromatic Glass for a sparkly refraction of light bracketed by colored glass.

If you wish to get technical, you can start your deep dive here.

The spiralized imaged tube is sleeved under vacuum to create an extremely thick tube with large images. While still hot, pulverized colored glass is added to the tube in a process called ‘backing’. The color of the glass is selected based on the ‘color’ of the dichro. The large tube is heated and stretched down to more usable material properly sized for bench melt.

At this point, the dichro / backed tubing is close to 19mm x 3mm. Instead of a carbon push, the end of the tube is ‘cleaned up’, cold welded to a punte and warmed to melt temperature 1/2″ from the weld. A twist constriction is emplyed to narrow the smoke path and create a bowl. 3/16 carbon push is used to create a 1/2″ wide x 3/16″ deep flower bowl. The bowl hole is measured with a tool and is either more than 2mm or less than 3mm.

Art

BITD, the artistic images were chosen based on popularity and public use. As one of the earliest glass pipe artists, Ray provided consultative service and prototyping to CBS to earn sole use of these selected images on tubes. Ray understood the refractive military use. In addition, he is an artist and selected refraction indices that worked with specific colors available in borosilicate glass. In the case of the Vortex image, Ray selected ref indices that worked with Green, Red and Black. The Gyrosmoke Dichro Vortex Glass Chillum utilizes Experimental Green #5 (a personal favorite), Red Elvis and Jet Black because they also add oxidation shift to the coloration during fabrication at 1400°F. Said differently, “It’s Mesmerizing!”

Hand Made in USA