Dunhill Shape 120 Redbark (Factory Error)

[georged]

Dunhill made sweeping changes in the early 1970s. They stopped matching the briar source to the finish, changed stain formulations, introduced the Redbark finish, went with a thicker bite zone & button, dropped many shapes, and "re-named" the ones they kept with new shape numbers.
A few pipes came out of that period that in hindsight appear to have been either production overlap errors or transition prototypes. This is one of them. Its date stamp is 1972, the first year of the Redbark finish, but it's much deeper and richer in color than the pinkish ones that came later. It also has slender stem work and the pre-changeover shape number "120".
Thought you Britwood guys might enjoy seeing it. It isn't a legitimate rarity, but there weren't many.
(PS --- yes, the stems of many of my pipes are oxidized. All catcalls and snarky remarks regarding such will be studiously ignored :lol: )
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[ssjones]

Beautiful George. I definitely don't see many Redbarks and I don't recall ever seeing a 120 shape. Personally, I love that type of grain wrap.
This is unique enough for me to move it the British section!

 

[kcghost]

Nice job, George.

 

[newbroom]

Looks like a shell briar that has been stained in the 'new' color. A carryover? NOS?

 

[doctorbob]

A rare bear. What a neat pipe.
Doc

 

[georged]

Looks like a shell briar that has been stained in the 'new' color.

Pretty much this. It would be fun to have a housefly-sized time machine camera to send back and see how the New Regimen was implemented back in the day.
My guess is not much attention was paid to "micro consistency" within the product when the word came down, only that the changes happened by a certain date. And on the first day there was supposed to be Redbark output, dammit, the workers made sure there was Redbark output. Even if it meant grabbing an "old process produced" Shell and merely finishing it with a new color and stamp.
The Redbarks that came soon after were pretty dreadful---chunky stems, meh shaping, and they always bleached out to a weird pinkish color in a few years---so the line's demise after a decade or so was probably deserved. The one in the pic, though, is quite nice in hand, has never faded in the 30 years I've had it, and smokes great.

 

[swilford]

The Redbarks that came soon after were pretty dreadful---chunky stems, meh shaping, and they always bleached out to a weird pinkish color in a few years---so the line's demise after a decade or so was probably deserved. The one in the pic, though, is quite nice in hand, has never faded in the 30 years I've had it, and smokes great.

Totally agree. There were some awesome examples with lovely stain early on, but the later Redbarks were usually pretty tragic. I got to see a huge pile of them altogether about fourteen years ago (like 150? I can't remember exactly but was a lot of Redbarks) and the early 1970s ones were generally really nice, while the later pieces in the 1980s were pretty awful, particularly on the staining front.
Seeing a bunch together feels like a slow, but uneven, progression downwards: early ones tended to be good, but weren't all good. Later ones tended to be not so good, but there were some gems in there too. You would think that a stain switch would be something that happened all at once, but apparently not.

 

[oldgeezersmoker]

Sykes, it could well be that the stain remained the same. Different briar blocks take stain differently. Perhaps different sources, countries of origin, etc as time passed account for the difference in later years.
The late (I think) Ed Lehman from the Chicago area had a collection of gorgeous Redbarks. Not sure what years they spanned.

 

[swilford]

Sykes, it could well be that the stain remained the same. Different briar blocks take stain differently. Perhaps different sources, countries of origin, etc as time passed account for the difference in later years.
The late (I think) Ed Lehman from the Chicago area had a collection of gorgeous Redbarks. Not sure what years they spanned.

Sorry for the late reply, just seeing this now...
Yeah, from what I saw, I think the stain probably remained the same and the application method changed. Briar changes could have played a role too, but in my experience there's more randomness within a given batch of briar than between batches of briar over time, so I don't think we would have seen such a consistent pattern if that had been the case.
Of course, I'm really just speculating, but our experiences with the series match: they were just way nicer earlier on.
Yes, Ed Lehman had a crazy collection of Redbarks. Part of his collection ended up with another Redbark collector when he died, which we in turn handled a few years later. I don't know to what extent the huge Redbark collection we handled back in 2003 (or thereabouts) was originally in Ed's collection, but there were pieces in it that I know were Ed's at one point. The collection we handled spanned 1972 to 1985. The ones I know were Ed's spanned the years (well, definitively, 1975 to 1984, but there are a bunch I didn't know provenance on).
Sykes

 

[tbradsim1]

. This has always been a favorite of mine.

 

[swilford]

This has always been a favorite of mine.

That's super nice. I like the Cumberlands with the smooth rounded rims...