I'll second the notion that you need to seal the bottoms. It's the same with hand poked diffused downstems. When they were first coming out with them, roor germany was one of the few companies doing it right. They sealed the bottom and then hand poked the holes. Illadelph, and other brands were just putting slits in a normal downstem. Air follows the path of least resistance so a couple little slits next to the rather large hole at the bottom just wouldn't fire. At least on the roor, the first 2-3 rows would fire...that's about the best you can do with these kinds of downstems, you just lose more and more pressure as more holes fire.
Oh absolutely. I was just wondering what everyones opinion was on the "best" brand of trees, and what features they had that made them better. I understand the concept of the open bottom, but as you said everything takes the path of least resistance, so the smoke will be less apt to fuck with the smaller holes when it can more easily just go thru the fat hole on the bottom. Maybe there's a balance to be found.
Its defiantly the gridding on the trees + those sealed ends i was talking about.. Its almost like 8 little G lines
If you restrict the hole at the bottom its more likely that the slits will fire first, actually now that i think about it if they created a downstem with a increased diameter where the slits are ( so it looks like a little barrel on the downstem ) and then reduced it after it would make it so the slits/holes would fire without the large bottom hole on the downstem firing until you cleared the bong