What fabulous pipe porn! I really love how Asteriou shapes the slot to obtain the maximum spread.
In my discussions with various makers and dealers of English factory pipes, it seems that there were differing views on what was most important between the quality of the briar and the quality of the stem work. Charatan and Sasieni were held to put more emphasis on the quality of the briar, over the quality of the stem work. Dunhill put more emphasis on the stem work over the briar. Barling considered both of equal importance.
In correspondence with Kennedy Barnes, he provided the following information on Upshall stems. He had written to me requesting information on a Barling that he had.
The conversation continues with a question that I asked:
BTW, a couple of years back, Pete and I were having a discussion surrounding manufacturers' philosophy over what was the most important in making a quality pipe. Pete said that Charatan put the quality of the wood far ahead of the quality of the stem and bit, while Dunhill went in the opposite direction. Barling - family era - he said, provided top quality with both briar and stem and bit. IIRC, Pete put Upshall in the Charatan camp. Any thoughts on this?
Ken's responses:
Yes I do. Our mouthpieces were mostly moulded and supplied by New York Hamburger Gummi Waren (Herr Fritag (Mr. Friday) was the manager of production). It was, in my opinion, the Achilles heel of James Upshall. However, with a production that reached 12,000 pipes a year, hand-cutting all the mouthpieces would have been a major, major challenge. At the same time, the moulded ones were difficult to finish and I recall many a batch which contained small silver specks in the rubber which were time consuming to pumice out. Mr Fritag said these specks were tiny flecks of steel coming off the moulds during production. Incidently this Barling mouthpiece has two of these tiny silver specks on it. Otto kept on at me about improving the finish of the mouthpieces. He used to say “it’s like wearing a finely made suit with cheap (and dirty) shoes. And then you have to put these shoes in your mouth”!
I definitely think that it was the ‘school’ that both Barry and me went through. I did find out later that Dunhill were ‘copy’ frazing their rods to standard shapes then drilling them and lip-opening them filing and floating them- Billy Taylor told me some of their methods. They were so much more geared up to hand-cutting.
‘floating’ is the stage after filing the rough shaped rod- filing down to produce the lip, saddle if it is a saddle etc. The Danes use a sanding belt for this purpose. English pipe-makers did not use belts but used sanding wheels which can very roughly shape the rod before filing. The process can be include using a coarse flat file (called a Bastard file) then a finer flat file. The floating is the next stage using a three sided file (do you know the type?) sort of triangle file, where the three sides of the file are ground down on a grind wheel to produce a three sided blade. This is then used to scrape the file marks out of the vulcanite by going up and down the length of the mouthpiece, quite quickly (‘floating’) – a bit like trying to scrape a carrot using the edge of a knife. This sharp blade can tuck right into the lip and prepare the final shape of the mouthpiece which is then ready for pumicing.
I was going through some photos and came across this one. We used to make hand-cuts, but not from rod. We used sheet vulcanite from NY Hamburger Gummi Waren. These sheets came in size 6ft X 4ft X 1” and were a higher quality than rod vulcanite as the pressure exerted during manufacture was much higher than the pressure applied to rod vulcanite and this resulted in a better quality. Sheet vulcanite was used before rod was made. I used to take these sheets to a local machine manufacturing company called Hi-tech (incidentally, this was the first time this word ‘hi-tech’ was used in the world!) and they would cut these sheets into ‘blanks’. Sheet vulcanite is not used anymore and I bought the last stock from NYH in 1978- enough to make 4-5 thousand blanks. Notice our friend ‘the bastard’ in the photo.
…all I remember is that they were incredibly hard to work. I never saw one ‘used’ so to speak, so I don’t know about oxidisation. We also bought some old stock from Sasieni-a few more sheets. Yes, they weighed a ton! That wooden ‘dolly’ wheel in the top right of the photo was also one of the originals from Sasieni- they were used before steel spindles etc and in my opinion they were better.
I figured that the Upshallphiles might find this information interesting.
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