Todays work resumes after a longer than expected hiatus. The snowstorm that ate the East coast "stranded " us in Sarasota. It was very sad but we made the best of it.........
While away I received in the mail a pipe special order I made for "The Neph" . A very tall full bent chimney with a natural plateaux top. Quite a unique design! Neph wanted an extra deep and defined blast so the services of Mr. Talbert were called for and he did his usual fantastic job. The results are below:
While working on this particular pipe Trever was inspired to write the following which he has allowed me to reprint here:
I sometimes do a little blasting work for Mark Tinsky on special pieces and
just finished up one that's a downright bizarre but amazing piece. It is
HUGE- it's a plateau-rimmed Oom Paul that's over 3.5" high in the bowl! It
struggled a lot during the blast because it was also really tightly-ringed
but this was what made me blink about the pipe. The rings are very close
and compressed and there are rings and rings and rings... I counted them
out and found this thing has *48* briar growth rings in the bowl. Since it
was cut from a plateau block there's no telling how much wood was under the
block, but this means the top of the pipe was in the ground for at least 48
years, probably much more. Given that it sat at the briar mill for a year
or so and I know Mark had it aging for several years, odds are that this
little piece of wood first entered the world in the early 1940's. This sort
of idle contemplation would probably bore lots of folk but I often find
myself calculating backward to figure when a pipe first came into being.
It's interesting to me to stop and think that this pipe I'm holding was born
during World War 2. Airplanes were prop-driven. Rockets were new. The
moon shot was in the distant future, and nobody knew who JFK was. No
computers, no internet, and no anti-smoking laws. And nobody was paying any
attention to the fact that this tiny little plant was struggling to start a
burl in the rocky cliffs of Greece - the same little plant that would end up
as a finished smoking pipe in the next century. As John Constantine would
say, "Funny old world, innit?"
The next pipe I completed before I left. It was a copy of a pipe I made in 1989 and was in for a stem repair. The owner asked me to revisit the shape as it is one of his favorites.
(Size 5 Mocha)
Good to have met so many ASP' ers at the Newark show today!
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