Below are some pics of pipes in my own personal collection. This is not an attempt at a complete listing nor a "Best Of" listing, but rather a jumbled selection of unusual pieces that have some story to tell.






This was the first Prungnaud clay that I got to try. I was impressed enough to buy myself several more, though this remains a personal favorite. My only problem was with the original vulcanite stem, which wanted to turn green on me. I dislike vulcanite stems in the extreme (I spend all day buffing stems and don't like having to do it in the evening to my own pipes) so I finally replaced the original stem with one of our horn stems. It came out to be a very classical combination.




I'm not often able to afford to buy high grade handmade pipes but this one was a worthy exception. Actually it was a surprise present from my wife after I had admired it at the 2000 (IIRC) CORPS pipe show. I kept wandering back to look at it and she eventually snuck in and bought it from Paul. Paul Bonaquisti is an excellent pipemaker and, as you can see, he does a great sandblast! This pipe has the dubious distinction of being my Godzilla movie pipe... whenever I put in some video full of giant rubbery monsters, this is the pipe I always have to smoke. I can't decide if I should tell Paul that or not!




This is probably the favorite pipe in my collection, a beautiful freehand by Randy Wiley of the USA. This pipe was an anniversary present to me from my wife so it carries a lot of sentimental value from that, but it was also a major struggle to adapt to! Randy Wiley makes excellent pipes (in fact, this one pipe may be my personal choice for most beautiful I have seen) but he works on very different design principles and this pipe presented me with two rather big challenges - a tall and narrow conical bowl that dropped to a tight point at the bottom (normally I prefer more cylindrical bowls) and a very tight draw. The bowl chamber was a wrestling match for a while until I learned to smoke flake tobaccos exclusively in it, and the cone design seems to favor flakes nicely. The draw was a bigger problem. I like pipes with a very open draw so I started by enlarging the shank airhole. This helped only slightly, and I was forced to undertake the risky mission of heating and unbending the stem, then drilling out the stem airhole to a larger size, and then heating and rebending the stem to match the original curve. Miraculously the stem survived this abuse and the airflow opened up nicely, making it my most prized pipe both for sentimental value and for being so hard-fought!


The first year that I became a full-time pipemaker was a tight one, and it was a constant struggle to keep the bills paid (though, in retrospect, it was a cakewalk compared to the horrors of trying to stay afloat through the move to France). I don't remember the exact post but at some point I was pining on ASP about the fact that I wasn't going to be able to afford to get myself a new pipe for Christmas anymore. As the season approached the 25th, I was completely surprised to receive this pipe in the mail from one of my regular customers, who had read my post and told me that no pipemaker should have to go without a new pipe on Christmas. I was quite touched by this, and whether from good karma or luck, this little Il Ceppo has turned out to be one of the best smokers I own.


This is another gift pipe of life-saving sentimental value. The months following our arrival in France were complete hell - the shop was a mess, we didn't have the tools we were familiar with and the new tools were complex to learn, our working permits were slow arriving, and endless other troubles I'll refrain from listing... in any case, we were seriously teetering on the edge of both financial disaster and sanity, and a friend sent this pipe over as a surprise gift. The value of a surprise present from home cannot be truly appreciated until one has moved to another country! Besides which, how many other people in the world can boast of having a meerschaum Cthulhu?!


This pipe was a gift to myself for surviving our first 6 months in France. It is unique in that it is a 9mm filter pipe and it has been my primary experience with charcoal filters, though I also own and smoke a few 9mm filtered briars. This pipe gets the heaviest workout however, as should be obvious from the shank coloring. At the time this photo was taken, I had only been smoking this pipe for about 3 months.