Oh, Look! Another Storage Room Full of Unfinished Stummels!

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swilford

Starting to Get Obsessed
May 30, 2010
209
747
Longs, SC
corporate.laudisi.com
Not surprising due to the way a factory operates, especially back in the old days.

A line would be tooled and setup for a production run of a specific product, and then those would be turned out until they reached a certain level, maybe enough for a whole year. A lot of factories also supplied raw stummels to other manufacturers.

A large manufacturer nowadays spends a fraction of time on setup these days. CNC equipment just needs the proper tooling placed in it and a program loaded, whereas back in the old days setup was done by hand, and would have taken a day or more.

Being able to change to different production so quickly nowadays allows for smaller runs to be made, lowering cost, less inventory on the shelves.

Craig, this is a good answer except that it's still more efficient to turn bowls the old way than use CnC today because CnC machines are just very slow. The two approaches coexist, with CnC more efficient up to X number of bowls (somewhere between 500 or 1,000 at once is the cross-over, depending on the set up and the shape) and French-style lathes-with-templates in steps is more efficient for larger runs.

The majority of bowls turned today are still made the old way.
 

craig61a

Lifer
Apr 29, 2017
6,164
52,948
Minnesota USA
Craig, this is a good answer except that it's still more efficient to turn bowls the old way than use CnC today because CnC machines are just very slow. The two approaches coexist, with CnC more efficient up to X number of bowls (somewhere between 500 or 1,000 at once is the cross-over, depending on the set up and the shape) and French-style lathes-with-templates in steps is more efficient for larger runs.

The majority of bowls turned today are still made the old way.

You make a good point. The cross-over, and mix of new and old equipment. And if the old equipment still works it’s paid for, and older workers are less apprehensive about using it.

Factories nowadays are probably not turning out the number of stummels as they would have 50 to 70 years ago. And production runs are probably more monitored these days, without huge overruns.

I have no experience whatsoever with the pipe manufacturing business. But I have a number of years process analysis, and I would imagine that most owners would adapt current best practices is production.
 
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craig61a

Lifer
Apr 29, 2017
6,164
52,948
Minnesota USA
Important things to know when assessing validity of these claims (and the claims are totally valid):

1) Bowls in factories are usually turned en masse. Setting up and tooling for bowl turning 'French-style' (which is also used elsewhere, but that's the term we use for it because it originated in France) takes a long time, so people turn a lot at once. It makes sense to turn all that you need for months rather than retool the line for another shape every few hours. Not all bowls are turned French-style, but if you're turning a lot of bowls at once, it's by far the most efficient way to do it (and the overwhelming majority of production at all of the larger factories is done this way). A typical run size for Savinelli is 2,000 bowls of a given shape at once. They don't use that many in a year for most of the shapes in their catalog (320KS, 606KS, 626 and a few others being exceptions, but they probably turn 105s every five or six years).

2) You have limited control on the yield. Briar is graded, so you turn more bowls when you need one or two of your grades, not when you're totally out. This leads to surfeits of certain grades (which grades are which and how things are graded vary from factory to factory, but the underlying issue is universal) over time.

3) The pipe industry in 1960 was about 50 times the size it is now. In 1980, Peterson made about half a million pipes a year. Today it makes about 60,000 pipes/yr. And it's one a tiny number of factories left; far more closed than are still around (and there are no pipe factories that make a lot of pipes that are not at least decades old).

Those three things in combination means, yes, there are piles and piles of old bowls laying around. Indeed, every real pipe factory--Peterson, Savinelli, Chacom etc--has high tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of turned bowls on hand, some of which they don't really know what to do with at any given time. So, part of running a pipe factory is figuring out what to do with bowls that aren't presently being used that might be five or ten (or in the case of the Chacom factory 50 or 75) years old.

The story in St Claude is particularly interesting because you have lots of pipe factories decades ago collapsing into very few today. On top of that, there was a huge shift in pipe tastes (size, bent vs straight) mid-twentieth-century, which effectively orphaned a lot of small, straight stummels (which is how Ropp happened).

Also, yeah, a stummel sitting there for five years and a stummel sitting there for fifty just aren't all that different (the older one is likely a little harder to work with in the factory because of how it takes stain, but I don't think it matters at all to the smoker), but it is interesting that they're old and all that comes with it (shape, size, and the story that goes with it).

Finally, as a consumer, it's easy to get hung up on bowl turning = making a pipe, which is not true. As a percentage of the work and cost that goes into making a pipe, it's somewhere between 15% and 25% (depending on a variety of factors and varies from factory to factory). It's a bit like saying 'getting iron ore to sheet metal in spec is basically car manufacturing, right?' When you think of it as a discrete input into a bigger manufacturing process, the fact that it's done discretely (as part of an independent process) from the rest of production into which shelved inventory is fed, it makes a whole lot more sense.
OK, a good succinct summary from somebody who knows what they're talking about...
 

fightnhampster

Part of the Furniture Now
Aug 14, 2019
942
2,664
Indiana
Interesting... The reason I largely believe these claims are legit is because aside from giving the pipes a bit of an interesting story, I don't see the advantage in it.. I don't see the old stummells as being any more desirable than new ones made by modern craftspeople and artisans... The brand I'm most familiar with in this area, Ropp, really does use some old timely shapes and dimensions as well...

I like my Ropp... And aside from my usual skepticism of marketing hype and the like, I trust SP. They're not perfect, and I don't love everything about them, but I do believe they're honest. Their involvement gives me confidence in the validity of the project, though I like the pipe regardless of whether it was shaped in 1920 or 2020.

+1

In addition, some of the Ropps for sale now are not listed as being NOS. I believe it is just the ones that are listed as 'vintage'. I have several Ropps, both vintage and nonvintage. They are great smokers for the price and I jive with the shapes.
 

swilford

Starting to Get Obsessed
May 30, 2010
209
747
Longs, SC
corporate.laudisi.com
For me, if it’s not a pipe finished by the original, it’s not that brand. It’s something else, but YMMV.

I think maybe I was unclear: by saying that it's an independent process at these factories, I wasn't saying that the bowls weren't turned by these factories (though in some cases they are not). I was saying that there's basically a 'bowl turning area' and it turns briar blocks into stummels. Those stummels go on a shelf and are used for pipes over time.

By saying 'bowl turning does not equal pipe making,' my point was simply that this all makes sense when you realize that the parts of pipe making that happen after bowl turning are the most labor intensive and expensive for a factory, suddenly it makes sense that you'd organize your production to do your bowl turning in huge batches as an independent process. At Savinelli, for example, most pipe production happens on one giant factory floor, but bowl turning has its own large-ish room on the other side of the building.

Another way to look at it is that you're taking a given shape--a Peterson 106 or a Savinelli 320KS or whatever--and you're finishing lots of different ways, with different stem styles and colors, different stains, different textures and different mounts. Obviously, it makes sense to make the bowls for a given shape all at the same time, as a discrete process, rather than have it in-line with the rest of production.

Most pipe making necessarily happens in serial (you sand it, you stain it, then you buff it, or whatever), but some processes sit outside of that linear flow. Bowl turning always sits outside of that, making bowls to inventory from which they're used for that serial process.

Also, it didn't occur to me earlier to draw a distinction between factory pipes--serially produced pipes--and pipes made one at a time, though I probably shouldn't have assumed it would be an obvious distinction. All of what I've said is true for factories like Peterson, Savinelli, Chacom, Vauen etc, but is very much not true for workshop-style or artisan-style production. Castello, Radice, Ser Jacopo, and all artisans, are turning one bowl, or a small group of bowls, at a time, with a mix of lathe work controlled by hand and the sanding disk.

Sykes
 

Aomalley27

Part of the Furniture Now
Mar 8, 2021
763
1,701
Chicagoland area
How old is really old? And Hormel, no?

Did you smoke it?

Rehydrate?

Flavor profile?
Yes Hormel (Hornet was stupid autocorrect)

They only owned Dial for a few years before Greyhound bought Dial (which lasted about three years. Yes! The Greyhound bus company).

So It’s probably from around 1986 or thereabouts? And I worked at Dial from 2000-2018. So it was OLD.?

Did I smoke it? Um no. Canned meat from 20 yrs ago?
No thanks.

Rehydrate? Pretty such whatever goo was in there was pretty gelatinous and didn’t need rehydrating, only tossing in a dump.
 

garageboy

Might Stick Around
Jul 15, 2019
50
45
Peterson found some amber stems not too long ago. You stop production of a certain line. Remaining stock is inventoried, and gets lost in the shuffle.

I worked for Dial Soap, who used to be owned by Hornet. Found a pallet of really old canned meat behind a super sack of T31, which is a 2000lbs sack of raw, translucent soap pellets.
Should have let https://youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA taste test it