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• October 17, 2024 The 2024 Vegas Pipe Show Round Up

  Vegas Baby The show started out strong on the 14th floor hospitality suites hosted by the Vegas Pipe Show and Smoking Pipes as well as room hopping to carvers, estate sellers, and vendors to pre-game for the festivities.  If you’re interested in what that looks like I’ll refer you to last years pipe show round up.  I circled with Brian Levine to get the totals in comparison to last year:  This year’s show numbers: 108 Exhibitor tables, 445 attendees, 3,250 Raffle Tickets, 100ish dinners, 172 Rooms in the Hotel. Last year, by comparison, 107 exhibitor tables, 425 attendees, 2,200 raffle tickets, 104 dinners, and 175 rooms on Friday and Saturday nights.   We were at capacity, basically, when it came to vendor tables and the dinner, so there is no physical room for growth at this point except for attendees. That said, we filled that smoking lounge to the brim.    New Carvers Spotlight Garret Woo (Pipes by Woo)   How long have you been carving?  Garret: I’ve been carving since 2021, and I’m guessing your next question is probably how’d you get started carving? James: Yes.  Garret: In 2021 I took a break from my full time job – that included machining and assembly work and I thought maybe it was time I made something that I would like and I started looking at youtube and Instagram and putting together my shop.  I did struggle on the stems to start and there was a lot of failure at the beginning.  James: How many pipes have you made so far? Garret: I number my pipes, so I just finished up 186.   James: What is your favorite shape you’ve been making?  Garret: I really dig Canadians and pipes with longer shanks and lovat Canadian blends.  I like to play with different shapes of stems on the longer shanked pipes.  The billiard would be my go-to shape but I want to learn more techniques on freehanded shapes.  I like to put brass and copper adornments on my pipes with my machining background it helps.  James: What is the craziest thing you’ve seen at this show? Garret: The first thing that comes to mind is the table over there with C-Pipes with the shapes and the size and petiteness and the intricate details they did.  You can check out what Garret is working on by going to his Instagram.  Stefan Cashwell James: how long have you been carving? Stefan: about 3 years. James: What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen at the show? Stefan: The Adam Davidson pipe with the clear shape and the bamboo—I don’t know if it’s 3D printed or what, but it’s amazing.  James: What’s your favorite shape to do? Stefan: That’s a tough question. I think they’re all the same shape, but what’s fascinating is that Dublin, volcano, and blowfish are all the same depending on how you turn them. Playing with that, with all its variations, is a lot of fun.  My favorite accent to use is also horn; it’s finicky, but it’s a great accent on pipes.  You can check out Stefan’s work on his Instagram.    Science: Meet Pipes I chatted with Chris from the San Diego Pipe Club; he started off doing stem replacements for estate pipes but also improved the airflow.   James: How are you doing 3d printing? What is the thought process? Chris: It’s a 3D-printed pipe with a briar insert. The design is a calabash meets a Peterson system meets a metal Falcon/Kirsten radiator style.  It is a bottom draft smoking bowl like a radiator like those metal pipes.  The inside chamber is a calabash. The stummel and accent rings in the stems are all 3d printed. The insert is briar, olive wood, or I have the potential to use meerschaum as well.   This idea came about through the San Diego Pipe Club, wanting to see if we could 3D print a pipe and being curious about the technology; I have a printer and design ability, so here we are.  James: What’s the type of plastic you’re using? Chris: It’s all PLA plastic, a renewable potato starch plastic that is food-safe.  The stummels are printed with a plastic that has wood in it 40% wood fiber, bamboo, rosewood, ebony, redwood, and walnut are the woods I’m printing.  For the accent rings I just got a new material that I’m printing that has 40% copper,  so its real metal that you can sand, and polish the same as wood filament.  The stems are 3d printed as well. The concept is renewable and cheap from a production standpoint, with the ability to make a very high quality smoking pipe based on the experience. By combining the calabash system pipe and bottom draft hole and using 3d simulations to see airflow, I can see where I’m having eddies and ripples in my current, and see where my moisture and all the particles are dropping back out from a vapor to a liquid.  Most people who have tried these say the stems are clean, and they don’t even have to run a pipe cleaner afterward because everything collects at the bottom.  Chris has also been experimenting with color-changing plastics so you can see the hotspots.  Chris said he was able to use this to slow down his cadence, which, of course, could mean you could get a slow-smoke training pipe to teach yourself to perform better.  If you’re interested in learning more or want to check one out, you can contact him on Instagram: Copper Beard Pipe Works The Negative Space The show was buzzing about one specific pipe, which had everyone guessing how it was made. I chatted with Adam Davidson briefly about it.  James: How did this idea come to fruition? Adam Davidson: Smokingpipes.com had an expo back in August open to all of the makers they carry. The theme was to make a pipe utilizing bamboo. Given that the last time we had the expo I made a smooth Almond with three bamboo shanks, […]

• October 15, 2024 Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 631

  Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 631. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with pipe maker Dan Keller from Good Made Better. Dan is from South Dakota. Growing up working in the family hardware store where he was always finding solutions to fixing things, he ended up always wanting to make things. He now makes elegant handmade pens, pen holders, portable desks, blotters, blotting paper, book carry cases, and of course artisan pipes. At the top of the show we are continuing the virtual tour of Brian’s pipes with his “f#@k you pipes”.

• October 8, 2024 Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 630

  Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 630! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Andrew Hopkins. Andrew is the General Manager of Stag Tobacconist in Scottsdale, AZ. He is the third generation in the business. His grandfather started with his store Phoenix Pipe Shop in 1974 in downtown Phoenix. It later changed names to Smoker’s Delight. He also owned Ye Olde Pipe & Tobacco Shoppe starting in 1980. Andrew’s father started in the business as a teenager helping out n the store in 1976. Andrew got into the business in 2007, and he has some great stories to tell as a third generation tobacconist. At the top of the show we will have an Ask the Tobacco Blender segment with Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy is the Head Blender at Cornell & Diehl, which is one of the most popular boutique pipe tobacco companies in the USA.

• October 2, 2024 155 Years of History, Stories, and Good Corn: the Missouri Meerschaum Anniversary

  Go back 25- 30 years ago, when Missouri Meerschaum was bought by three gentlemen, Michael, Larry, and Bob.  Michael tells the story about one of the reasons they purchased 150 acres of land: to ensure they had enough corn to stay in business.  The story goes like this: the local Missouri farmers had lost another crop of corn due to catastrophic weather.  Things were getting desperate when it came to keeping the factory running because of the shortage of corn cobs, and Michael looked to California to grow some of the hybrid corn they use for pipes.   He found several farmers willing to grow their seed, and once they were done, Michael found a truck driver who agreed to transport the corn from California to Missouri, but with a story like this, there has to be something.  In this case, the truck driver only had one arm, his left arm.  He drove three back-to-back trips from California to Washington, Missouri, reaching across his body with his left hand to shift gears.     With the year’s most recent devastating floods and loss of corn, this was their only solution to keep the doors open, and Michael realized that he and his partners needed to secure their own irrigated land to grow their hybrid seeds.  He found 150 acres, but his other co-owners were not entirely convinced it was their best option.  Fast forward a year, and another massive flood in the existing fields caused that year’s corn crop to be lost again.  The partners were ready this time, but the land price jumped an extra 200k.  They finally managed to buy the irrigated property and secured the future of Missouri Meerschaum with those 150 acres.     Celebrating 155 Years in Business   This year, the 155th anniversary was hosted at the Missouri Meerschaum pipe factory in downtown Washington, Missouri, near where Lewis and Clark stopped and camped in 1804 on their way to Montana.  This year’s festivities coincided with Washington’s Fall Festival of the Arts & Crafts, which brought thousands of people downtown to try food, buy arts, crafts, and other assortment of items in the quaint little town, and, of course, get tours of the historic corn cob pipe company.      Missouri Meerschaum is a complete Farm-to-Table process   You can smoke a corn cob pipe today because of an intense dedication to getting it right, from the non-GMO hybrid seed that the University of Missouri helped Missouri Meerschuam work on in the 1970s and 1980s to the way they harvest and remove the husks to the 2-3 years the cobs have to sit and dry out so they can be turned into a pipe.   An interesting tidbit is that modern corn is nothing like the corn that was grown in our past; with modern farming methods, corn is grown for the number of corn cobs, not for size, and modern yields are usually 30,000 seeds per acre. The University of Missouri found out, through testing, that to get the larger corn cob, you need less corn planted, and the sweet spot for Missouri Meerschaum corn is around 18,000 seeds per acre.      This is partly because corn will pull a ton of nutrients out of the ground, and there is only so much to go around, even with crop rotation. Thus, modern farming can do a number on your fields, and you’ll have much smaller cobs unsuitable for pipes.     It can take six to upwards of eight months to shell all the corn that is harvested through the custom built walnut shelling system they have at the corn crib. Nothing goes to waste, either.  All the corn kernels that are shelled go to this large silo pictured above that is sold to two places: ADM (Archer Daniels Midland), which does corn processing:  From Wikipedia:  The Corn Processing segment converts corn into sweeteners and starches, and bioproducts. Its products include ingredients used in the food and beverage industry, including sweeteners, starch, syrup, and glucose (dextrose). Dextrose and starch are used by the Corn Processing segment as feedstocks for its bioproducts operations.      The other place where the corn is sold is Pinckney Bend Distillery, about 20 minutes down the road in New Haven, Missouri.  The white corn that Missouri Meerschaum uses has a higher sugar content and is perfect for making a great whiskey.     There, the corn is turned into glorious whiskey, which you can drink Missouri Meerschaum-grown corn whiskey while you smoke your Missouri Meerschaum corn cob pipe while sitting in the place that makes it all.  Meta much?   Unfortunately, the laws of the state of Missouri say they cannot ship outside of the state, and the current distribution is not large enough to reach most readers, but you can drive there and buy some bottles to bring home.      Of note, aside from the great whiskeys they have, they also have a whiskey with some flavor to it called Apple Ambush, which, I kid you not, tastes like you’re drinking spiced apple pie.     The Pinckney Bend Distillery offers a tasting flight for $15, which includes a glass. The flight includes eight or so different liquors and a tasty mixed beverage.       When we stopped at the Corn Cribb, we checked out the two 1980s model pickers. Modern Combine/Harvesters don’t do the job needed—keeping a pristine cob that can be used for the pipes.        From Start to Finish   Cobs are stored for 2-3 years on the 2nd and 3rd floors of the factory, where a shoot that goes down to the first floor drops cobs ready for production. Each corn cob you smoke takes around a week to make.  They leave the windows open at the factory, especially during the winter months, because it helps dry out the corn better.   The cobs come down the shoot and are cut into the size they need based on their current production.   Next, the […]

• October 1, 2024 Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 629

  Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 629! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Danish Pipe Maker Mike Sebastian Bay. Mike got his start in pipe making when looking for someone to repair his father’s pipes in the Copenhagen area. He inadvertently found renowned pipe artisan Tom Eltang, and apprenticed under him for several years. He learned Tom’s signature rustication technique, and then made it his own. His pipe designs are also known for the poker shapes with “the bend” – after the forward tilt, there is another angle bent forward. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss everything about aging tobacco you will ever need to know.

• October 1, 2024 Fall and Pipes: Made for Each Other

  Now that the gritty tooth of summer is loosening its grip a bit, the feel of fall is faintly signaling its changes just around the corner. Warm days and cool nights, which begin in higher elevations, tell trees that the weather is changing (no, Pundit is not a meteorologist. Just an interested watcher of trees!). Change in trees signals it is time to halt the production of chlorophyll. That’s the green stuff that gives tree leaves their color, doncha know! Cooler nights work to close the veins in leaves, producing more red than green color, or something. It’s like the legend Red Smith, sports columnist for several newspapers including the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times, once sayeth: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter, cut open a vein, and bleed.” Trees author their own stories in the fall. And that brings Pundit to something of a point here. Fall is for taking short walks (ahem, for some of us these days). A pipe in hand. Quick pipe puffing, ogling the beauty surrounding us. It’s free for the most part in neighborhoods. But big national parks are another matter these days. Charges have emerged for some visitors just arriving at a specific time! Money Ball! Pundit loves this time of year with a good aromatic blend, or a sweet Virginia with just a touch of perique or one of those special blends that Jeremy Reeves cooks up for Cornell & Diehl. I especially enjoy his English blends, and always the return of Golden Days of Yore, an annual (pull for its continuation), and a couple of other of Reeves’ Small Batch productions for SmokingPipes.com. Such as Steamworks, a flake with old Red Virginias, perique, and some oriental tobaccos. For a wonderful read on the versatile Virginia Red Flake, read SPC.com’s Chuck Stanion in his splendid story on “The Versatility of Red Virginia: Carolina Red Flake Sept. 20, 2024, in Tobacco Talk.” The piece is a Masters Class on blending Red Virginias, with even a state of Georgia version. It is so well worth reading. Reeves compares the versatility of Red Virginias to variations of different teas. There are so many great fall smoking blends that Pundit has a challenging time choosing what goes with a solid walk in the woods. At times, Pundit closes his eyes, reaches into the cellar, and picks out a batch of something. Maxim at Pipes2Smoke has said it best: Sept. 20, 2024 “On Sunday it will be the fall equinox, the sort of official start date. I like many others will start reorganizing my tobaccos. Fall means, to me, heavier and fuller tobaccos that smoke slower. English Mixtures, think Latakia, oriental tobaccos, and some full flakes with Latakia. And the pipe get(s) bigger to carry these more robust tobaccos. To me fall in the North East is the best pipe smoking time of year. No, death defying humidity so the mixes smoke far better in every way and we enjoy them more that continues till next spring. When it starts getting humid again. Not a big deal but it is fun to mark the passing of the seasons.” For me, It’s all about enjoying nature, both with pipe and tobacco, and a stroll through the colors. There are interesting stops along the way, such as a mighty stream, rushing toward its ultimate connection with a larger body of water. And just a quick note on the Madison River, one of Pundit’s recent trips to a beautiful legendary stream, and bucket list musts. This was one of those five-star trips. Only, it had been years in the making and realization. As Pundit has written before, I was a flyfishing-aholic! In my younger days, I waded rivers in Georgia, Arkansas, Missouri, Upstate New York, and the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. I even pulled off a float trip on the Snake River in Idaho, and a quick one-day fishing the Yellowstone River in Yellowstone Park, a true gold medal experience. But I kept a constant eye on grazing buffaloes. The great beasts were not particularly happy about my presence. But as all the years flew by, I yearned to cast flies over some of the legendary streams: the Madison River in Montana, especially. I got that chance in September when Guy Bartle, a dear friend and long-time flyfishing buddy, and the finest fly caster and angler I have ever known, invited me to join him in a float trip on the Madison. If you are still with me, this is not precisely a pipe-smoking adventure. In the past years, I eagerly carried pipes and tobaccos with me to many rivers and stream banks. But not this time. Guy is not a pipe smoker, and the Madison River was not the proper place to pop out a pipe. Especially in 20-30 miles per hour blustery winds. We put in at a place called the Palisades where the river rippled in white, curly waves. Spray whipped a bit from the wave crests. Our expert guide, Scotty Hall of his Big Sky On the Fly outfitters in Big Sky, Mont., says “I love stripping streamers!” For you uninitiated fly fishers, a streamer is a longish flashy fly that is so attractive to large brown trout on the Madison River. To say that Pundit was in a state of bliss is putting it too mildly. He was giddy with delight. Now a Pipe Smoker of the Past: Niels Bohr, was born Oct. 7, 1885, in Copenhagen, Denmark, and died Nov. 18, 1962, in his hometown. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his theory in quantum physics. Bohr and Albert Einstein, another famous pipe smoker of the past, were friends and colleagues. They also conducted friendly debates over time about quantum physics, a wee bit over Pundit’s head.  If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet—Neils Bohr. Fall is a time for pipes and […]