hit this.
A Savinelli Straight Grain “C”, new old stock, vulcanite non filter stem, a tiny unobtrusive fill on the heel away from being a Golden Jubilee. The seller, Chance at Great Estate Pipes, had to, at my request, use a loupe to find a fill and differentiate it from the Birdseye grain, but he said it was definitely a fill. No surprise, I have seen only one that didn’t have putty somewhere, almost always on the heel or the underside of the shank and always minuscule. The one unfilled example I have seen had a very slight unfilled fissure, but I have a Castello kkkk Collection with 65 easily GG size that has a similar issue right on the side of the bowl in plain view of God and everybody. I picked up a 114KS saddle bit billiard as an estate piece in this grade for like $25 back in the mid 1990’s and the stem work was equal to any Dunhill.
I used to own this shape, 803KS, in a Punto Oro. I consider it to be a definitional Lumberman, which is still in Savinelli’s shape chart. The grade is no longer listed. The grade used to be a tough sell in the US market, at least as I recall, because they were priced at half the cost of a Golden Jubilee and just a few bucks less than a Punto Oro. That put it into high grade territory and customers, me included, didn’t want high grades with putty. Silly me.
I placed this post here rather than a “show off your Savinellis” category because of the recent discussion about whether to buy more pipes or more tobacco. I fully anticipate a coming Internet/mailorder ban on pipe tobacco in my lifetime (shout out to Big Pharma). But value is where you find it. For $125 all in, I will keep swinging dead cats.
“You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a pipe of some sort, old or new, used, abused, estate, cheap, artisan, briar, cob, meer, clay, metal, glass, brylon, taxidermied armadillo carcass, whatever”
A Savinelli Straight Grain “C”, new old stock, vulcanite non filter stem, a tiny unobtrusive fill on the heel away from being a Golden Jubilee. The seller, Chance at Great Estate Pipes, had to, at my request, use a loupe to find a fill and differentiate it from the Birdseye grain, but he said it was definitely a fill. No surprise, I have seen only one that didn’t have putty somewhere, almost always on the heel or the underside of the shank and always minuscule. The one unfilled example I have seen had a very slight unfilled fissure, but I have a Castello kkkk Collection with 65 easily GG size that has a similar issue right on the side of the bowl in plain view of God and everybody. I picked up a 114KS saddle bit billiard as an estate piece in this grade for like $25 back in the mid 1990’s and the stem work was equal to any Dunhill.
I used to own this shape, 803KS, in a Punto Oro. I consider it to be a definitional Lumberman, which is still in Savinelli’s shape chart. The grade is no longer listed. The grade used to be a tough sell in the US market, at least as I recall, because they were priced at half the cost of a Golden Jubilee and just a few bucks less than a Punto Oro. That put it into high grade territory and customers, me included, didn’t want high grades with putty. Silly me.
I placed this post here rather than a “show off your Savinellis” category because of the recent discussion about whether to buy more pipes or more tobacco. I fully anticipate a coming Internet/mailorder ban on pipe tobacco in my lifetime (shout out to Big Pharma). But value is where you find it. For $125 all in, I will keep swinging dead cats.
“You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a pipe of some sort, old or new, used, abused, estate, cheap, artisan, briar, cob, meer, clay, metal, glass, brylon, taxidermied armadillo carcass, whatever”
