@pitchfork since most meerschaums in my collection have been repaired at some time or other by silver banding you can roughly guestimate the age by the silver hallmarks. Other pipes with a clear makers name and address in the case are easy as all you have to is trawl through the trade directories and find out when they went out of business. Some pipe styles are very era specific to the 1870s and 1880s and then decline in popularity by the 1890s. Have you talked to Tim West about a new screw in mouthpiece for that second pipe. Also if you trawl Oi Vey dot com there is a very regular seller of 'screw in' amber stems.
@organizedmadman your meerschaum 'cutty' is vey nice but was made towards the late 1890s and I see you have had a new amber style stem fitted which makes a lot of sense if you are going to smoke it. I can assume that is the regular 5 1/2 inch pipe? They way to tell them apart is the 'bowl foot' if you look at some of the pictures I have posted you can see the pipes have a very defined 'foot' which was used to hold them as opposed to rest them on the table as in the case of some of the clay pipes. The curved 'foot' was an improvement on the traditional clay 'cutty foot' and was very popular from the 1890s right up to the out break of the First World War. It was designed to be held between the finger and the thumb. I have a couple of these that came from a relative who purchased them new in 1913 at 23 Shillings each (One Pound Fifteen Pence) as he was at medical school and then he sadly got wiped out in France in 1916 and the pipes were returned along with his wrist watch.
@organizedmadman your meerschaum 'cutty' is vey nice but was made towards the late 1890s and I see you have had a new amber style stem fitted which makes a lot of sense if you are going to smoke it. I can assume that is the regular 5 1/2 inch pipe? They way to tell them apart is the 'bowl foot' if you look at some of the pictures I have posted you can see the pipes have a very defined 'foot' which was used to hold them as opposed to rest them on the table as in the case of some of the clay pipes. The curved 'foot' was an improvement on the traditional clay 'cutty foot' and was very popular from the 1890s right up to the out break of the First World War. It was designed to be held between the finger and the thumb. I have a couple of these that came from a relative who purchased them new in 1913 at 23 Shillings each (One Pound Fifteen Pence) as he was at medical school and then he sadly got wiped out in France in 1916 and the pipes were returned along with his wrist watch.
