Questions Regarding Iranian Hookah

[Parviz]

I received a Ghalyan as a gift recently and I'm not very familiar with how Iranian Hookahs are supposed to be set up. (It's embarrassing because I'm Iranian myself but I've only ever used Arabic hookahs before) Instead of a ceramic bowl, there is a metallic one that is attached (picture: http://tinyurl.com/l9mm2g ) to the top. I'm assuming that this is meant to be used with the traditional Iranian dry leaf directly in contact with charcoal method? If so, I have the following questions:

1. Can I still use it with regular "wet" tobacco (that is used in Arabic hookahs)? Can I treat the metal bowl the same way as a ceramic and just put the tobacco in there and pull aluminum foil over it? If so, are there any extra steps I should take? The metallic bowl is quite larger compared to the regular ceramic ones I've seen before.

2. Does the "crown" on there (open: http://tinyurl.com/mcrprb, closed: http://tinyurl.com/lmvqae) serve any purpose or is it just for decoration?

Thanks in advance for your help and sorry if any of my questions seem stupid,

Parviz

[gunsboy]

Yes, you can use regular shisha with it. You might want to squeeze the shisha and you will need to change some of you heat management techniques to get the best out of this. I have used a similar one before, but the airflow in it was not that great. Nothing beats those KMs.

This crown looks sweet. It would probably protect the carpet from larger pieces of coal falling incase the hookah tips over.

[liquidglass]

Well I can't answer how to pack an Iranian hookah but I will say it looks awesome!

As far as the crown, to my knowledge it's used sort of as a coal wrangler to make sure coals don't go flying off the bowl. Especially when using dry leaf and piling the coals on.. But if you happen to figure out a way to use a more wet shisha then the crown would not only be decoration but serve the same purpose to keep coals on the bowl.

In fact I think I might look into making something like this that could fit any bowl. It would def be better than a foil coal keeper, especially for the fact you could line it with foil if need be.

[Parviz]

Thanks a lot for your help thus far. I'll give it a try tomorrow. My other concern is the size of the bowl. If I pack the shisha in very tightly, it's going to take a LOT of shisha to fill up the whole thing (although that will probably mean it will last longer, i guess). Naturally the foil top is going to be much larger than usual as well, so I may end up using more than one coal. Do you have any suggestions concerning heat management techniques?

In case you're interested, here's a picture of the whole thing to give you a better idea of just how big it is http://tinyurl.com/mxpy3f Edited June 9, 2009 by Parviz

[gunsboy]

With heat management it will depend on what Charcoals/Shisha you will be using and how are you going to pack the bowl. But a general rule is to start with coals on the outsides of the bowl and move them around to end the session with the coal right smack in the middle, while ashing the bowl and I have noticed that blowing air into the bowl while ashing it helps sometimes if you detect harshness.

The bowl is huge and I would suggest just spreading some shisha around in it, you are better off not filling it anyways, leave a little bit of space between the top of the shisha and the foil. This would prevent the shisha from burning too fast.