I Swung A Dead Cat and...

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Oct 7, 2016
2,451
5,195
hit this.
10890

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”
 
Oct 7, 2016
2,451
5,195
Some of those Sav's punch out of their weight class!
i haven’t really paid much attention to the brand since the mid to late 1980’s, but in those days I was extremely pleased with the ones I owned. I have started looking again, and I am not terribly impressed with most of the more recent trims, stain colors, filter drilling and acrylic stems (made my peace with acrylic stems long ago, but Savinelli had truly excellent Vulcanite stems in those days on high grades and Autographs, so I see the switch as a downgrade.)
 
Oct 7, 2016
2,451
5,195
I also found a Sav 920 ks unsmoked on eBay for about $15-20 several years ago! It’s a fantastic pipe that’s well loved and smoked often.
Perhaps with the aid of threads like the one I saw your post in, those days will return. I have been looking off and on for the shape and this was one of the grades from the pre filter days I would accept, but the combination just hasn’t come up in my sporadic searches except for one way over priced buy it now offer a year or so ago, an estate pipe that the guy wanted more than I paid for this new one.

Cellar broad! Cellar Deep! Make eBay Great Again!
 
Oct 7, 2016
2,451
5,195
Great pipe. The Canadian family of shapes is usually excellent. As mentioned in another thread, I think a well crafted fill lends character to a pipe. Look at that vast chamber. Happy smoking.
Actually I am not a huge fan of oval shanked taper bit “true” Canadians. But the 803 KS Lumberman (oval shank, saddle bit) Punto Oro I used to own was a champion smoker primarily because the stem was so damn well done I am reasonably certain from the pictures that this one is from the same period,, the 1980’s, and in those days the stems on this grade were equal to Punto Oros and Golden Jubilees. Stem aside, just from the execution of the shape, I don’t think that anyone makes a better Lumberman than Savinelli.
 
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