The German text (which does not appear in EN/DE versions) describes the materials chillums can be made from and various improvements on the construction of bongs to make cleaning easier, or reduce harshness of the smoke. Although these improvements are clearly present on the bongs in this thread, it is the first time I’ve read descriptions of why they are added to modern bong design.
Chillums (and referring to cannabis as ganja) were also common in Malaysia well into the 1970s, having been introduced there by the indians – the harsh clampdowns (much of which has now been scaled down) only arose around the late 1970s onwards.
I suspect the high quality of bong construction in DE and other German speaking nations is not unrelated to the number of small factories that still remain (making stuff like furniture, coat hangers etc) where folk from DE as well as TR, SY and other Middle Eastern and Asian countries work peacefully together and have in fact done so for the last 40 odd years. You always see these factories on “Die Sendung mit der Maus” – I didn’t realise so many still remained in operation; but it always seems to be older Germans and younger foreign staff working in them (a bit like healthcare here).
These sometimes sell off old machinery such as lathes, for only the scrap value of the metal, and many houses have 3 phase electricity (which you need for medium size motors) – it is not at all uncommon for Onkel / Opa to be building all sorts of stuff in his garage and as long as its nothing to do with violence or terrorism no one bothers them.
With “modern” CNC equipment (from 1980s onwards) the design could be perfected at someones home workshop, stored on computer and then processed through a factory making loads of other stuff for longer production runs..
