Photography by Jonathan Coward for Herb
No pipe? No problem—here’s how to make a pipe out of a pen with handy visual cues.
If you’re trying to MacGyver a pipe out of random household items, turn to your trusty pen—chances are you have quite a few of them laying around. Not only are they abundant, but it’s also comically easy to turn a pen into a pipe. It’s almost as if they were built to be deconstructed and smoked out of. Remember this the next time your teenager asks you to buy pens for back to school. Do they really need a pen to do their school work? It’s 2019, are they even using pens anymore? More likely, they are planning to blaze it up with Lil Mikey, that new kid from Canada, in the third-floor washrooms. I digress.
When it comes to making pipes, not all pens are created equal. There are pens you may come across that are not even worth the effort. The optimal pen to turn into a pipe comes with a screw-off metal tip, a back end that can be pried off, and an ink cartridge that is easily removed.
If your pen has all three of these things, you’re halfway to victory. Furthermore, if the tip of your pen is not made out of metal, that means you will probably end up smoking plastic (or whatever toxic material the tip is made of). You do not want to smoke plastic. Take our advice; find a pen with a metal tip.
In order to turn this pen into a pipe to smoke cannabis out of, just follow these simple steps.
1. Unscrew the metal tip of the pen. It should look like a little cone with a wide hole on one side, and a thin hole on the other. Put this aside. This is what you will use as your bowl piece.
2. Pop off the back end of the pen. You can usually accomplish this with your fingernails. If, however, you have stupid little baby fingernails because you bite them down to the nail beds, you may have to use a butter knife.
3. Pull the ink cartridge out from the inside of the pen and toss it in the garbage. You should be left with an empty cylinder piece, which will serve as the body of the pipe. This is the part that smoke will travel through.
4. Take the pen’s metal tip, and shove the thin end into the hole at the end of your empty pen cylinder. Try to cram it in there tight enough that it stays in place on its own. Sure, you could tape the metal tip to the empty pen cylinder. I’ve even seen people use glue. But then you may accidentally smoke glue fumes, or whatever kind of weird and likely toxic material your tape is made out of. So just put some muscle into it and lodge the metal tip in there with force. If all else fails, chew up a piece of gum and use that to secure the metal tip to the empty pen cylinder. You should now have a crude looking pipe, with the upside down metal pen tip serving as your bowl piece. Fill this metal tip with cannabis.
5. When it comes to how to smoke out of a pen, put your lips to the end of the empty pen cylinder, and while lighting the cannabis in the “bowl piece” (metal pen tip), inhale. If you weren’t successful in securely lodging the metal tip into the empty pen body, you may have to hold the pen almost vertically so that the metal tip doesn’t fall out of the empty pen cylinder mid-hit. In this case, keep in mind you will look like a tourist who got excited by the all-inclusive alcohol selection and is now trying to go snorkeling on dry land. This is best done alone where nobody can watch. Exhale, and enjoy.
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