Where Did the High End Kaywoodies Go?

[Briar Lee]

This is my best old Super Grain. It’s a wonderful smoker but the grain isn’t great.
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That is an early thirties “shank cloverleaf” pipe, and since it’s a Super Grain that’s one of the first $5 grade Kaywoodies.



A decent, smokable geniune imported briar pipe about 1933 was as little as a quarter and a dollar was kind of a luxury.



What five dollars bought was outrageously tight grain, like on this $ 5 Marxman Benchmade.

 

[MattRVA]

That is an early thirties “shank cloverleaf” pipe, and since it’s a Super Grain that’s one of the first $5 grade Kaywoodies.

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A decent, smokable geniune imported briar pipe about 1933 was as little as a quarter and a dollar was kind of a luxury.

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What five dollars bought was outrageously tight grain, like on this $ 5 Marxman Benchmade.


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Come to think of it you’re right, the grain is tight, probably why it smokes so cool.

 

[MattRVA]

Also has the larger ball stinger… for what it’s worth. Seems much better than the later designs.

 

[didimauw]

This is my best old Super Grain. It’s a wonderful smoker but the grain isn’t great.
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They keep using the word "Super". But I dont think it means, What they think it means.

Beautiful Pipe though!

 

[bullet08]

What happened to them? Most likely same thing that happened to the rest of great American products. No longer have enough skilled people to make them. Cost too much to make them. Someone else's making it cheaper.. You know. Capitalism.

 

[Briar Lee]

What happened to them? Most likely same thing that happened to the rest of great American products. No longer have enough skilled people to make them. Cost too much to make them. Someone else's making it cheaper.. You know. Capitalism.

Capitalism has decided that extremely high end briar pipes in America are artisan made today.

I have four Kaywoodie pipes, that are all shape #13 Large Dublin.

Kaywoodie mass produced millions of luxury pipes a year in huge factories, using machines to shape them to within a whisker and then hand finishing.


Every pipe that graded out Kaywoodie originally cost $3.50. There were hundreds of shapes in the catalog, all $3.50 about 1930.

Then came the $5 Super Grain, a failed attempt in 1935 for a $10 Straight Grain, and in 1937 a $10 Flame Grain made from 200-400 year old Greek briar.

By the late thirties KB&B, the parent company, was producing 11 million pipes a year.

Kaywoodie still makes pipes today. One man makes a few a year.



I’m looking at a Golden Era Marxman Super Briar that has such incredibly tight grain, it will not accept stain. Unless it’s waxed and smoked it’s almost as white as a sheet of paper.

I’d love to see Kaywoodie’s most closest grain late forties Centennial for comparison

 

[sasquatch]

As time wore on, and fewer people smoked pipes through the 70s, brands like kaywoodie (and weber and lee and mastercraft ... all of em) diminished in popularity and as they were never really seen as high-grade brands, I think it was tough for the average pipe smoker to dish out 2 or 3 times the money for a pipe with better grain. Your die-hard smoker never cared, and collectors proper were never looking at the rack in the drugstore.... so I see these pipes as neither fish nor fowl, nice as they are.

I've got a Connoisseur here, I assume 60s. Great little shape and a nice piece of wood. The stem is pretty nice (less thick and chunky than a Lee or a Mastercraft). Smokes okay, I find those woodies so tight of draw (Lees are just a hair more open and you can feel it when you smoke them).

 

[sasquatch]

Meanwhile, anonymous French factory pipe from the same era.

 

[sasquatch]

"Capitalism has decided that extremely high end briar pipes in America are artisan made today."


Umm.... no, a reasonable understanding of pipe making decides that. There was never an "extremely high end" briar pipe made in a factory. Even today's very best factory-based offereings (say Savinelli autographs for example) are utterly lacking in the things that make true high grade pipes. Perfections of proportion, finish, and most especially stem work just don't occur in these kinds of pipes they way they do in a true high grade piece where every detail is considered, every curve, the length and shape of the stem (which is cut as a one-off piece designed for the pipe, not simply grabbed out of a box and fit to the thing).

The very best high grade pipes (and I know this because I don't generally make such pipes) are methodically made, every piece crafted as a one-off representation of the idea the pipe is presenting. Factory pipes, at their best, are nicer looking versions of the same pipe made daily. Being expensive isn't what makes a high grade pipe high grade. Being a rendered vision done perfectly is.

 

[HeavyLeadBelly]

My Flame Grain 72 Meershaum that I know little about. I got it from a friend who cleaned out a hoarders house and I think it’s late 60s? Got it NOS and of course I’m smoking it. It’s a shame it sat so long unsmoked!

 

[huntertrw]

Where Did the High End Kaywoodies Go?​

I know where two of them went. On a Saturday afternoon a number of years ago I found, in the basement of an antique mall in a city some 45-minutes away, a cased pair of Matched Grain billiards. The price was more than I was comfortable spending just then, and so I did not purchase them. Over the next few days, however, those pipes pleasantly haunted my dreams, and I simply could not get them off of my mind.

The following Saturday I set out for the distant mall, determined to add these beauties to my collection, nevermind my budget. What I did not know was that a fire had gutted the building a few days before, and those pipes (plus everything else in the store) were reduced to sodden ash. He who hesitates...

Incidentally, this incident brought to me a whole new meaning to the term "flame grain."

 

[Briar Lee]

My Flame Grain 72 Meershaum that I know little about. I got it from a friend who cleaned out a hoarders house and I think it’s late 60s? Got it NOS and of course I’m smoking it. It’s a shame it sat so long unsmoked!


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That is a pre 1950 four hole stinger.



It was made of absolutely top of the top grade of 200-400 year old Greek briar. A truly magnificent Flame Grain.

But it appears to be small ball, and is stamped Imported Briar, which means it was made after the war started and aluminum got scarce to make stingers and there were fake domestic briar pipes sold as “Geniune Briar”



It was meerschaum lined, so it cost $12.50, the cost of the meer lined option.

How in the world could Kaywoodie top these?



They were much smaller because of the styles then, but how could it be topped today?

That particular grade of briar is long gone.

 

[HeavyLeadBelly]

It’s a beautiful pipe that smokes amazingly. Thank you for the background

 

[sasquatch]

That particular grade of briar is long gone.

What the hell are you talking about?

 

[HeavyLeadBelly]

What the hell are you talking about?

He’s talkin briar my friend, Gods gift to mankind Bobby

 

[Briar Lee]

What the hell are you talking about?

Kaywoodie tried and failed in 1935 to launch a $10 Straight Grain.

At the time the $5 Super Grain was the most expensive pipe in the world except for larger sizes of Marxmans.

The 1937 Kaywoodie Flame Grains, in the shape numbers of the $5 and $3,50 pipes was an out of the park home run.

They claimed they used 200-400 year old briar from Greece and Albania, (both corrupt nations where Kaywoodie bought monopolies).

 

[n_irwin]

I scored some Kaywoodies from the 1930s recently and posted about it over here…

eBay lot of Kaywoodies and Comoys from the 1930s :: Pipe Talk

I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting when I bought this lot of pipes on eBay because they weren’t well presented, but the one that caught my eye was a Kaywoodie Super Grain, as I noticed the clover inlaid on the stem and remembered reading at some point that these were older and a bit rare...

pipesmagazine.com

 

[sasquatch]

I never understood briar. I know briar very much, I have studied it better than anybody. I know it is very expensive. They are made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none, but they are manufactured, tremendous — if you are into this — tremendous fumes and gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right?

So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right spewing, whether it is China or Germany, is going into the air.

 

[filmguerilla]

Let’s assume it’s the four hole stinger era and you want a new pipe.

The other pipes in 1947 have to really be good to beat a $3.50 Drinkless. A Drinkless more or less defined a forties luxury pipe.

Would you like to spend $5?

Here there are gorgeous Webers, Lees, LHS and Marxman pipes to chose from.

At $10 a Kaywoodie Flame Grain is the Packard of the bunch. My first goal as a pipe smoker was to smoke nothing but Flame Grains.

Then I discovered Three Star Lees.

The Kaywoodie customer got so much pipe for $3:50, $5, and $10 I’d say he was a hard sell for $15, $20, and $25 Kaywoodies.

But they made quite a few, no doubt.

I have an older Weber (a cavalier) that I adore. Haven't come across a Kaywoodie yet that I just have to have (though I have a white billiard by them). Great list here.

 

[milk]

I rarely spot a 4-digit poker, or something shape like that, on eBay. And the straight grains - I’ve rarely seen ‘em. I do see early KB&Bs from time to time. mkelaw has some clover billiards, though they’re expensive. The rare shapes are, well, exceedingly rare.

I wanted to ask this: the long list of finishes on various websites still seem to be missing numbers/finishes. Maybe I’m wrong. It can’t be exhaustive. Have people really never come across other finishes?