Was searching around on EBay, and found this, my newest acquisition. The posting itself had 13 images available, and in the first 3/4th of the gallery, the images in no way showed any signs of wacky high-quality block (which is my whole thing), but after close inspection, wham, it was on its way to me.
I recently learned why not many of the images had much of its pattern visible, as when I was trying to take pictures of it myself, it didn’t want to cooperate at all, but here it is as best as I could capture it.
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Calabash shaped, with a 0.87 inch chamber diameter, with a taper that must go down to .70 at the very widest. It is also 2 inches deep, and 5.75 inches long.
First MBSD, talked to some of the folks running it, very nice and respectable. Also first time with a briar-mortise insert for the 9mm filter system, nice and smooth push and pull. I hope it holds up well to time. It looks like this pipe falls more under the traditional Altinay translucent grade, meaning more focus on the specklage with less focus on the clearer, super-fast-coloring silicate that I personally feel fits the title of translucent meerschaum a good bit better. All things considered though, it shows a nice, visible translucent silicate layer all over the pipe, which’ll most likely color real well in contrast to the more calcified specks, even though there are no super deep pools of clearer mineral to my eye.
VA’s in both this and the Yanik micro-speckled acorn, so it’s not gonna color as if I’m smoking aros out of it, but it should speed along, as clearer silicate is want to do. No matter what, a cool pattern to stare at and catalog!