Happy Holidays 2021

It is the morning of Christmas Eve 2021, and I am sitting in my basement-cum-office with a hot cup of black coffee and a bowl of Haunted bookshop in my Savinelli 622. I re-stemmed this pipe, and it is actually the only one of my stems that I own (but more on that later). As …

Un-Snapping a Shank on an Orlik Calabash

I had a challenging repair come through the shop that I thought might be worth documenting and possibly would be of some interest. The pipe is an Orlik Calabash and the cap and shank extension on the pipe appear to be ceramic, although it could be highly polished meerschaum. I’m far from an expert on …

Happy Holidays 2020

It is the morning of Christmas Eve 2020, and once again there is hot coffee, a pipe, and time for shared reflections. This year I am smoking some vintage (2005) #10 Downing Street in my Briar Spirit bent Dublin (at least I call it a bent Dublin). I’m finding that aged Latakia takes me back …

Banding a Cracked Shank

Well, I am not doing a great job keeping this blog up to date. We have had all the same struggles that the rest of the world has experienced during this lovely year, and it has left little time for reflection. And that is what this blog is really all about for me. Reflection on …

Happy Holidays 2019

It is early in the morning of Christmas Eve 2019, my favorite time of day. The quiet is conducive to thought, and to work. As I set down to work on writing this, my third holiday greetings blog post, I realized that I had not done very much blog writing this year, and thought it …

Rethinking the Retort

A retort is a fairly simple device used to clean and sanitize the interior of a briar pipe. Most pipe smokers are familiar with the concept. Some sort of glass container is used to boil alcohol and a tube transfers the hot vapor to the interior of the pipe via the stem. There are a …

The Eye of the Beholder

It is a summer afternoon in the late 70s. I’m kneeling on the wooden floor of an attic helping my grandfather extend the plywood floor across more of the ceiling joists in order to gain some additional storage space. We finished for the day and began to stand in the cramped space available. I, a …

Happy Holidays 2018

It’s the morning of Christmas Eve 2018, and as I sit down to enjoy a bowl of Haunted Bookshop with some fresh brewed coffee, it occurs to me that it has been too long since I wrote anything for you. I had great intentions when I started writing at the beginning of 2018, and for …

Results of the Great Filter Challenge

In my last post, I laid out the challenge of testing a set of 4 different filters in my new Savinelli 311 KS. I first smoked the pipe for several weeks using the Savinelli adapter that basically replaces the filter with an approximately normal airway. I smoked the pipe twice each week, and always smoked …

The Great Filter Challenge

My first pipe was a Dr Grabow which took 6 mm paper filters. After the first box (I think it came with the pipe) I never bought another filter. Initially this was simply a matter of convenience. I could not detect a difference in the smoke with or without the filter, so the filter was …