I would like to ask the more experienced members of this forum how their preferences in pipe buying developed. I would also ask how they came to be smoking what they smoke but tobacco preferences are more fluid and harder to quantify.
I wrote a post a while back in which I said I’d run out of pipes to buy because at around 30 I thought I’d reached the limit of the pipes I wanted to smoke. But I’m a relative newbie and I had bought a broad cross section of pipes with visual appeal as my only criteria.
A smart move was to begin a data base of my pipes and tobaccos. Weight was the first criteria that became important to me. My lightest pipe is a 28.5 gram Hilson Prince and my heaviest is a Vauen bent Apple sitter at 70.5 grams. And although the Vauen is very well balanced and fairly easy to clinch, I prefer lighter pipes. As to shapes I think my preferences run toward Billiards, Apples and Bulldogs, either straight or bent, although I have a few Dublins which are quite nice.
I recently purchased a couple of estate Comoy pipes on-line and they were a revelation as to how well a light weight pipe could smoke.
I guess one’s pipe buying preferences should evolve simultaneously with one’s tobacco preferences but other than chamber diameter I don’t really connect the two. My tobacco preferences are still wildly erratic. I don’t believe my tastes would every come to the point where I would buy a dozen of one kind of pipe and 50 lbs of one kind of tobacco and say I’m done. Although I’m sure someone probably has.
I wrote a post a while back in which I said I’d run out of pipes to buy because at around 30 I thought I’d reached the limit of the pipes I wanted to smoke. But I’m a relative newbie and I had bought a broad cross section of pipes with visual appeal as my only criteria.
A smart move was to begin a data base of my pipes and tobaccos. Weight was the first criteria that became important to me. My lightest pipe is a 28.5 gram Hilson Prince and my heaviest is a Vauen bent Apple sitter at 70.5 grams. And although the Vauen is very well balanced and fairly easy to clinch, I prefer lighter pipes. As to shapes I think my preferences run toward Billiards, Apples and Bulldogs, either straight or bent, although I have a few Dublins which are quite nice.
I recently purchased a couple of estate Comoy pipes on-line and they were a revelation as to how well a light weight pipe could smoke.
I guess one’s pipe buying preferences should evolve simultaneously with one’s tobacco preferences but other than chamber diameter I don’t really connect the two. My tobacco preferences are still wildly erratic. I don’t believe my tastes would every come to the point where I would buy a dozen of one kind of pipe and 50 lbs of one kind of tobacco and say I’m done. Although I’m sure someone probably has.