Description

Alien Dichro Image Glass Pipe

Phone home … and make sure you don’t need to stop at the dispo on the way. That awesome new sparkly dichromatic glass pipe got delivered today and it’s time to season it!

Functional

Fabricated with specially licensed imagery from dichro maker CBS, the Alien Dichro Image Glass Pipe is one of several unique effigies 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.

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

The 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. A 3/16 carbon push is used to create a 1/4″ 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. The long eyed oval Alien face is unmistakable and was chosen for the project. 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. He was also an artist and selected refraction indices that worked with specific colors available in borosilicate glass. In the case of the Alien image, Ray selected ref indices that worked with Green. The Alien Dichro Image Glass Pipe utilizes Experimental Green #5 (a personal favorite) because it also adds oxidation shift to the coloration during fabrication at 1400°F. That’s a lot of techno bable to say:, “It looks DAF!”

Hand Made in USA