WHAT INSPIRED OUR BLOWPOKES
People ask, What inspired our Blow Poke?
Enjoying the warm glow of a wood fire… Fires with friends and family make our times together just feel more special. My favorite firetool was our blowpoke. Everyone in the family really enjoyed using it. And it served us for a long time. But early one season, our brass Blo-Poke developed a crack – a split – down the side of tube – near the mouthpiece.
Our old BloPoke leaked air from a long crack in the brass tube by the mouthpiece.
So when we blew into the mouthpiece – air hissed out the crack – instead of feeding the fire. That’s What Inspired Our Blowpokes.
At first, we covered the crack with our hand. But the crack grew longer, and soon it needed two hands to cover it. But with 2 hands by the mouthpiece, the weight of the heavy Brass Blowpoke was just too heavy to hold up!
Our favorite firetool had stopped working for us. That’s when we all realized how much we used it. We depended on our blowpoke to keep our fires burning better. I won’t go into the sticky mess I created putting tape over the crack. But my dissatisfaction festered.
And I started thinking about making a better Blowpoke:
- Lighter weight made sense. Why so heavy?
- Light, handy and comfortable – Easy to use – for everyone in the family.
- Better Poker Tip for tending fires – Better than a tiny poke “fin”.
- AIR FLOW Performance is the key to better combustion.
Researching Blow Pokes
I started researching Blowpokes online, and at fireplace dealers. Soon I’d gathered up a box of pokers and blowpokes. And I brought them all to my best friend’s design studio.
Jack’s an industrial designer with a metal fabricating shop. His “job” is to design things to work better. He heats his home with wood, and hosts a great fire pit. We tested each blow poke, and rated the performance for the full range of fire tending tasks. And we retested – again and again – to really understand every facet of each tool. We worked to understand each of their designs, understand their performance issues, and analyze their construction issues. We discussed their solutions, limitations, and “compromises”.
As we gained more insights, we were a bit surprised that they were all less awesome than we hoped. Overall performance was underwhelming. That’s when we really started playing with our own ideas. We built a series to help us develop our ideas for a range of better performance features. Then we dialed in each performance feature until we knew we had the best performing Blowpoke designs.
We built a batch of new Blowpokes. And gave them to friends for hard testing in fireplaces, fire pits and wood stoves to get feedback. They confirmed that both our designs and our fabrication processes worked.
The next season we offered our BlowPokes to some New England Fireplace & Hearth Dealers. Fireplace Dealers work in a world of Heavy Metal. So right off the bat, our new poker’s lighter weight was a real surprise for them. They had never used a firetool made of CroMoly Steel. They needed to test the tool’s strength and durability. Our blow pokes had to prove it’s worked better… Then they ordered… And their customers bought. And it felt pretty good.
Black Blow Poke with buffed Brass Mouthpiece from Vineyard Firetools is welded for strength and performance.
You can read about the various performance our blowpoke design advances here.
Top quality, task-designed, better performance all around, and good value: all in a new blow poke that really works well. And made in the US.
Eventually we expanded our range so you can find the best Size to give you better performance for your complete range of fires – Small, Medium, Long, XL and XXL. And we expanded our range of finishes to give you the choices you want.
My brother likes that it makes his life easier and more fun. He showed me how he also uses his Blowpoke to quickly stoke BBQ coals in a Chimney Starter. He really enjoys the new ease of tending a good fire in the quest of good food. Some customers use their blowpokes for wood-fired ovens, and make wood-fired pizzas. I love it!
For me, I appreciate knowing that our Blowpokes really work. And that they work better than the others – for starting, stoking, and tending our family’s fires.
And I’m humbled that our “inspiration” has come his far.
Best wishes for a very comfortable
winter – warmed by your wood fires.
John
john@vineyardfiretools.com
858-663-9791