I finally broke down and decided to carve my own pipe. I don’t have a lathe or a drill press so I decided to go with a pre-bored kit, which I ordered from Mark Tinsky. It was quite a learning process but I was ultimately satisfied with the results of the carving. Here are some pictures of the final product:

If you want a blow-by-blow pictorial essay of the carving process, check out my Flickr photo set which contains step-by-step pictures and descriptions of how I carved this thing.