Happy Holidays 2020
It is the morning of Christmas Eve 2020, and once again there is hot coffee, a pipe, and time for shared reflections. This year I am smoking some vintage (2005) #10 Downing Street in my Briar Spirit bent Dublin (at…
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Banding a Cracked Shank
Well, I am not doing a great job keeping this blog up to date. We have had all the same struggles that the rest of the world has experienced during this lovely year, and it has left little time for…
Happy Holidays 2019
It is early in the morning of Christmas Eve 2019, my favorite time of day. The quiet is conducive to thought, and to work. As I set down to work on writing this, my third holiday greetings blog post, I…
Rethinking the Retort
A retort is a fairly simple device used to clean and sanitize the interior of a briar pipe. Most pipe smokers are familiar with the concept. Some sort of glass container is used to boil alcohol and a tube transfers…
The Eye of the Beholder
It is a summer afternoon in the late 70s. I’m kneeling on the wooden floor of an attic helping my grandfather extend the plywood floor across more of the ceiling joists in order to gain some additional storage space. We…
Happy Holidays 2018
It’s the morning of Christmas Eve 2018, and as I sit down to enjoy a bowl of Haunted Bookshop with some fresh brewed coffee, it occurs to me that it has been too long since I wrote anything for you.…
Results of the Great Filter Challenge
In my last post, I laid out the challenge of testing a set of 4 different filters in my new Savinelli 311 KS. I first smoked the pipe for several weeks using the Savinelli adapter that basically replaces the filter…
The Great Filter Challenge
My first pipe was a Dr Grabow which took 6 mm paper filters. After the first box (I think it came with the pipe) I never bought another filter. Initially this was simply a matter of convenience. I could not…
Music, Quality, and Pipes
In the novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” the late Robert M. Pirsig writes about the protagonist experiencing a string of bad results from a motorcycle repair shop that caused more damage than was originally evident. He noticed…
Which Wax?
I had someone ask me about a particular product being sold to aid in pipe restoration. I won’t mention the actual product here because I have never used it. But I suspect that it is a type of microcrystalline wax.…