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  1. sasquatch

    A Rumination on Whether It's Worth $32,000 (US)

    Napoleon Dunhill Jr smoked that pipe at Woodstock.
  2. sasquatch

    Dunhill now made in Italy?

    Lots of "info" from about 1:30 on in this video George, some really specialized cam-driven operations, and some hand work. Lots of hard and soft disc sanding. And this results in certain aspects being very very standardized, and some aspects being a little Friday-ish sometimes.
  3. sasquatch

    Dunhill now made in Italy?

    Dunhill never carved a pipe that I know of. He hired pipe carvers and gave them very specific mandates. You keep using the word "consensus" incorrectly.
  4. sasquatch

    Dunhill now made in Italy?

    There's no briar growing in London. None. So yeah, some part of the pipe comes from somewhere else. Is it wood only? Is it a half finished bowl? Doesn't hardly matter. The fitment of the stems, the drilling, etc, hasn't changed in 100 years. Same with the stems - made from rod...
  5. sasquatch

    Dunhill now made in Italy?

    Dunhills are made in the shop at Walthamstow. Stanwells are made in Italy now (or maybe France at this point) instead of Denmark. Maybe that's what your confused salesperson was thinking of.
  6. sasquatch

    School me on Vulcanite

    There just isn't ebonite on every street corner any more. The germans have a couple factories, Schonberger and New York Hamburg, and they make very good rods, very clean, no bubbles. The Japanese stuff feels a little different, I don't know about oxydation with it, better or worse. And...
  7. sasquatch

    Should I Care about this Drilling by Castello?

    I have a lovat drilled similarly, possibly the best smoking pipe I own. It's not dead center, but it's at the bottom of the chamber... the pipe will work fine. It's a little... disappointing, when you get one shipped to you that is like this, but it's going to smoke fine.
  8. sasquatch

    School me on Vulcanite

    It will oxydize similar to black ebonite. Some of the colors are less prone to it than others, I have a blue rod that is like rock to work with, and it oxydizes less or at least seems to show it less than the black stuff. At the end of the day, if you want a maintenance free stem then you...
  9. sasquatch

    School me on Vulcanite

    So here's a couple of those stems "in the wild". Fitted, polished, bent. This is how pipes are made. Now, in a one man shop, the rod would have been cut to a length that suited the pipe, the resulting stem being a better aesthetic match. But that's "next level" stuff. What we are...
  10. sasquatch

    School me on Vulcanite

    Bingo. I hate working with acrylic, it's grippy, tough, and unpleasant to tool with the exception of polishing. But I also hate green stems and my feral-mammal saliva attacks vulcanite pretty badly in many cases. I also smoke very much for the flavor of the tobacco, and adding a rubbery...
  11. sasquatch

    School me on Vulcanite

    And really the name "Cumberland" comes from Dunhill, they used this type of rod on a series they named "Cumberland" many years ago.
  12. sasquatch

    School me on Vulcanite

    Cumberland is a rod made (traditionally) from a mix of red and black ebonite. It can be wrapped in sheets or done as a group of long rods crushed together, which is a much nicer presentation. There are now many colors available, SEM in Germany has pushed the envelope on food-grade colorants...
  13. sasquatch

    School me on Vulcanite

    Those are vulcanite. It's ground up into basically dust, heated and forced into shaped moulds is my understanding. Occassionally you find a blank like that with a crack or a fissure because of it, which never really happens with the rod stock. There are other stem materials in play these...
  14. sasquatch

    School me on Vulcanite

    Man you're dumb George, that's the ultra-rare "My God, it's full of stars!" ebonite they used shooting 2001: A Space Odyssey.
  15. sasquatch

    School me on Vulcanite

    Most stems on most pipes are "cast" I suppose, injection molded vulcanite. They come in every shape and size you can imagine (in fact in this picture you can see the designation number on some of the tenons. This is what probably 99% of the pipes ever made got. That includes every Wilmer...
  16. sasquatch

    Do We Have A Forum List Of Carvers?

    Forums are for sure a dinosaur platform. There's still a few carvers hiding in the shadows on most boards, but participation is often frustrating. Turns out absolutely everyone knows more about carving pipes than pipe carvers do (not limited to pipes, the audiophiles, chefs, mechanics, etc...
  17. sasquatch

    Yan Can Cook

    Martin Yan is the guy's name. This is classic:
  18. sasquatch

    Pre-Transition Barlings: Worth it and Where?

    I have one, I won't buy another. It's a good pipe, a quality pipe in all ways. It's built to a more modern standard than many other classic pipes are, but it's still not as tight a tolerance as most North American artisan pipes, and the airway is smaller than I prefer, though not by much...
  19. sasquatch

    BRIAR AGE AND GRAIN

    I mean, here's two blocks. Same size designation, similar ring count (age), same vendor, same batch. One of them has great grain the other is totally disappointing, random washy grain, it's just not as "nice" of a piece. So a guy pays 30 bucks for the piece on the left and 15 bucks for the...
  20. sasquatch

    BRIAR AGE AND GRAIN

    I don't think in those terms when I pick a block for grain. I've never ever picked up a block and seen nice grain and thought "Wow, that's a really young block." Grain as we talk about it is the xylem of the plant, and in the heart of the burl, it's twisty random stuff. Out at the edge...
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