Dear Nexians,

Recently I made a useful modification to my classic VG and created a pictorial.
The reason for this upgrade is that when I use my VG I have almost no visual feedback on the vapor. Because of this I set out to modify my vg to a glass hybrid vg.

Things I wanted:

A very easy solution
A low cost solution
A nice looking pipe

Hopefully this pictorial will inspire some of the VG users to upgrade as well.
If you do, pleas post a pic.

Anny questions or modifications to the pictorial as well as grammar or textual errors (im not a native speaker) let me know and ill adjust it.

take care

Fantastic work man, deeply appreciated. I see this has taken you a long time to prepare and document for us and it is very useful for many, myself included Good idea....the only problem might be finding a a gas burner hot enough to make glas glow....but a test tube...so simple yet so great

Great. One could even customize it with a "swirly straw" type of glass etc.

Well done and thanks for all your effort and time!

thanks,

Most propane burners will be around 1300 degree Celsius witch is hot enough for cheap test tubes made out of Soda-lime glass. Also i have tried to melt them on a regular gas stove witch did work to make the hole. The stretching didn't go as well as wit a proper burner.

So I don't have any soda-lime test tubes lying about... would borosilicate be too heat-resistent to work? All I have is 3 borosilicate tubes. Luckily enough the stove I've been using lately is propane, so if borosilicate won't work I'll try to find some regular ones.

btw, thanks so much for doing the legwork and practical info on this, it will make all of us classic VG owners right up there with the GVG-elite! For real, this is an EXCELLENT TEK! Thank you! I'll report on how it worked for me!

this should be added to the wiki.

Success!

Using a steel bar and a propane stove, a mouthpiece was made in a borosilicate test tube. It didn't get as pliable as soda-lime glass probably would have, but it got soft enough work. Instead of following the TEK exactly, I simply ground down the body of my VG to fit the test tube by using a drill as an ad-hoc lathe, so that I didn't have to mess with getting the fitting and drilling the wood. After breaking the tube a bit and fixing it by filling the tube with ice cold water and setting a string tied around it on fire with isopropanol.

So here it is!

Woops! Here it actually is!

Ok please work this time!

Aaaa its great!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry that I didn't reply all that much but after a serious bad trip (to much with black out and complete panic attack followed with a short depression) I needed a brake which included not visiting the nexus (it was that bad). So your pipe looks great did you test it?
Did it give you the visual feedback ?

Thanks again for being inspired to try and upgrade your vg
I won't be here for some time because I'm going to the Balkans for a couple of weeks but then i come back I can ad this to the pictorial as a different route

thank for sharing and if you give it a try please let us know how it works out.

greets

Thanks!

Yes it gives good visual feedback, although since I broke about an inch or so it is shorter and a bit harder to look at while hitting than I would like, so when I get around to it I will make another stem piece from the other tube I have.

I had not seen the vapor going into my lungs before, it's quite enchanting... (of course I rarely see it coming out ) and I am happy to be able to retrieve some spice from my apparatus now, which was basically impossible to do with the VG. I'm very happy with my new hybrid G/VG - thanks a ton for inspiring me to do it! This is really a great idea, as we don't all have the $110 to get a sherlock GVG... one day... and I love DIY stuff like this.

The difficult experiences are part of the deal, this is a very serious tool (not that I have to tell you that), and occasionally it throws you a curveball... baseball analogy may not work for people outside the U.S., huh? It's like that sometimes!

Have fun on your trip!

Well expandaneum, this is awesome. Soon as I get some test tubes I'll try this out. I'll go with the AlluminumFoilRobots version as this simplifies things.

really creative solution.. it actually looks pretty good too. thanks for sharing

If you do it the way I did be sure to use a paper-towel gasket, as you will want to cut the wood a bit smaller than the glass - the wood was a TINY bit too big and that's how I cracked it.