Meet the family (my pipes)

Thought I’d offer up some piccies of my cluster of pipes. Nothing too exotic, but to be honest, I actually quite like that. One of the things I like about the pipe is it’s inherent simplicity. It also means I’m not fearful of using/carrying them. However, there are still a couple that I would be very upset about if they got lost or damaged. IMG_20160621_132248_800_600 IMG_20160616_102553_800_600 Thank to to the members here for their support and guidance in me finding my feet with these pipes. Your input has been invaluable in me getting comfortable with the pipe with minimal expense, frustration, and calamity.

The keen eyed amongst you may notice that one of these still hasn’t been smoked. To be honest, it’s kind of surplus to requirements at the moment. The most frequently used ones are the two Parkers which I’m still developing a cake on, the Baby Wellbent which is the only non-sitter and the only pipe I clench, and the Mizzou cob and Bent Ozark which are my general use, knocking about in the garden pipes.

That looks like a fine selection to me.

Cobs - not being traditional in the UK - never really appealed to me but having finally bought one, used it, and found how well it smoked, I will probably get some more.

I particularly like your Parker sandblast poker - you posted a larger picture of that in another thread and I thought it was a very handsome pipe.

I hope that you enjoy them all and that they bring you many years of pleasure.

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Thank you, Chris. I totally agree on the cobs. When I first saw them, I just assumed they were a kind of novelty throwback, rather than a “viable” user. How wrong I was. The Mizzou is general use, the Washington is for Ennerdale and other lakeland aros, and the Country Gent is for sitting in front of the chiminea with, armed with a nice single malt whisky beside me The two Parkers are my “dress” pipes. The black one (is it a Cherrywood or a Poker?) I’m using for English blends, and the four square panel for aros. IMG_20160616_104504_800_600 IMG_20160616_104401_edit_1023_600

Just a quick note on the Panel shown above. Being Parker, it is essentially a Dunhill 4124, made in the same factory, which has been rebranded as for whatever reason it didn’t meet the Dunhill cosmetic standards. Honestly, I can’t find any fault with it, and if I had bought the same pipe with the White Spot branding it would have cost 15x what I paid for this (no exaggeration). I’ve not figured out which model the other one equates to yet. I’d be interested in doing a similar price comparison on that one.

If anyone else wants to join in with piccies, please feel free :slight_smile:

Congrats … that’s a nice start!  What pipe tobaccos are you liking the most?

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Start? :)) I think (hope) that’s me set for a very long time. I’m only having maybe 10 bowls a week on average at the moment, and see that fading to mainly weekends only once the novelty wears off. I would say snuff is more of a focal point for me if it wasn’t for spending time in the sun with some new stuff. Squadron Leader and Bob’s Choc Flake are two definite faves. Pigtail gets loaded up if I just need a full on nic fix, and Ennerdale, Coniston Cut Plug, and SG 2013 Ltd Edition have been enjoyed as nice summertime smokes that are a little less obnoxious for people I’m sat with. I had a bowl of Commonwealth Mixture earlier, and have been carrying the “beard note” around with me all day since. I did have a tin of 1792 Flake which I find a little much for me on the Tonquin side, so I used that in the 9mm Molina Hobby which tones it down just nice … although the tin seems to have gone AWOL at the moment :-S

[QUOTE] Start?  I think (hope) that’s me set for a very long time.[/QUOTE]

LOL … that’s what we all say!  ;)   

FYI … Squadron Leader (good stuff!) is on sale at P&C right now and available in bulk.

:smiley: Yeah, I’ve had plenty of other “acquisition disorders” previously, so I know what kind of slippery slope it could be. I’m hoping those lessons from the past will steer me straight on this one. :stuck_out_tongue: To be honest, I already feel I have more than I need. :-t Thanks for the tip on the tobacco, but I’m not in the US, and the combined shipping and customs would make it rather futile for me. :slight_smile:

If you have as many pipes as you smoke bowls every week, you probably do have enough. People have rules, such as resting a briar as many days as bowls you smoked in it. Meh. I give a cob a day off and it’s good to go. I’d rather not be owned by my pipes.

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@TerrapinFlyer yeah, I think we’re very much on the same page there. I’m not a stickler for resting a pipe, as I don’t smoke often enough for it to be an issue, and I do give them a clean out after a couple or three smokes. Some days I might load a bowl, smoke half, and finish it off the next day. Other days I might have three bowls… or none at all. :slight_smile: If I was starting afresh with the knowledge I now have, I’d probably only have maybe 6 or 7 of these pipes, and be perfectly satisfied. I’d probably forego the two Mini Legends, the Molina Hobby, and the second Ozark. Possibly have gone for a slightly smaller cob than the Washington too. I do like the small size of the Baby Wellbent, but I also resent the fact it’s not a sitter, so maybe I’d look for a similar pocket sized briar sitter I also like cheap. :stuck_out_tongue: what I paid in total for all these pipes brand new, is less than what many people would consider paying for an estate pipe, which don’t appeal to me at all. To me it would be like buying second hand underwear, and no matter how many times they were cleaned, I wouldn’t be comfortable using them. Each to their own.

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Ha ha, I wish I had my old man’s old pipes, but buying estates is not for me. I don’t buy used underwear or chewing gum, either!

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@50ft_trad @TerrapinFlyer - One thing I’ve noticed about cobs is that, while I’m sure they benefit optimally from some resting time (and I do typically rotate my cobs), they don’t seem to require resting to the extent that briars do.  My hypothesis is that it has something to do with the natural wicking ability of the material itself.  (Not only does corn cob wick moisture, it also wicks heat, which might account for the fact that a cob might be quite warm to the touch and still provide a cool smoke.)  I’ve gone for three or four days at a time smoking the same cob, several bowls a day, without noticing any particular sourness or degradation in smoking performance, as long as I’m not stingy with the pipe cleaners.  They’re very forgiving pipes.  When I first got into pipes (briars), I was so fussy and fidgety with them it prompted the tobacconist to ask me, “are you smoking the pipe, or is the pipe smoking you?”

I also agree with the “used underwear / used chewing gum” analogy regarding estate pipes.  Even if you replace the bit, saliva from the previous owner’s years of use is bound to have absorbed into the cob, wood, or whatever material, and the idea of smoking that is just . . . ugh.

Finally, I appreciate the low cost of the cob - if something were to happen to it, I’m only out a few bucks.  I’d rather spend my money on quality tobacco than on a high-priced pipe that isn’t going smoke much, if any, better than my ten dollar cob.

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@MarkM Totally agree! Cobs are really quite fool proof, and even if you prove to be more fool than even a cob can handle, you’re not looking at big money to replace it. From that perspective, I think they are excellent piPEs and tremendous value for money. IMG_20160616_104925_4160_3120 Personally though, I only use them at home and wouldn’t use them if I was sat in a beer garden with friend’s or round at someone’s house for a party/BBQ, because they really don’t hide their cheapness in their appearance. That’s where my two briars come in. Despite that, the most expensive pipe that I own, only cost the equivalent of three Country Gentleman cobs.

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@50ft_trad - I agree about the appearance.  If you smoke a cob in public, you have to be prepared to be thought of by some as some sort of hillbilly.  Then again, smoking a briar pipe these days tends to get you labelled as an “anachrophile”, like wearing an ascot or spats (or, come to think of it, like taking snuff), and smoking a meerschaum or calabash might raise speculations about the possibility of time travel.  Then again, I’ve advanced to an age where other people’s opinions of me I find increasingly irrelevant, not in a defiant hipster sort of way, but just in the way of “I don’t care”.

Yes, cobs can certainly take a beating.  I’ve dropped them on a number of occasions (I’m clumsy), and I’ve never yet broken one.

Nice pictures, by the way.

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Thanks Mark. I’m also clumsy, and the cobs and the Ozark have have been fumbled and clattered to the ground several times. I haven’t actually braved the big wide world with one of my pipes yet. I’ve gone as far as having one in my pocket, but the only time I’ve smoked a pipe away from home was on a car journey to a friend’s house, and smoked a bowl when I was there. However, this is a friend I’ve known since I was five, and nothing surprises him anymore. I haven’t lit the pipe in public though. As to the cob, they were never used over here. The poor man’s pipe over here was the clay AFAIK I have occasionally taken a pinch in public, and a couple of people have looked as if they were unsure what I was doing, but didn’t question it. As I have a slightly uncommon appearance with the long hair and beard, they might have been a little more inclined to think it was more than tobacco. I haven’t braved the pipe yet partially because it is so archaic here. It’s not that I am worried about how it looks, but that people might think I am smoking it FOR the look, if that makes sense. Again, having a slightly off-piste appearance may lead some to think there’s other things smouldering away in there too. I just can’t be doing with having to educate idiots without being paid for it :stuck_out_tongue: The day will come though, and by then I want to be “competent”, and for my pipes to be at least as well seasoned as my abilities :))

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@50ft_trad - re: " It’s not that I am worried about how it looks, but that people might think I am smoking it FOR the look, if that makes sense."

That makes perfect sense.  Incidentally, pipe-smoking is as archaic over here as it is where you are.

I learned a new word today - “off-piste”.  That’s a new one!

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Pronounced like “peace”, but with a “t” :wink: For some reason I’d actually gotten the impression that the pipe was still more popular over there than over here, particularly in the rural areas, and especially with the prices being so much lower over there. On another forum I frequent (not smoking related), there was a thread about the pipe, and IIRC there were a number of American members who were regular pipe smokers (I don’t think any were city folk), and only two Brits who owned a pipe but they would only smoke a bowl very occasionally, one of which used his hand rolling tobacco…

I hear of pipers coating the inside of cobs with honey. Some go to the extent of mixing cigar ash into the honey before they smoke a new cob. The science behind it helps insulate and build cake. With cigar mud ensures the cob don’t burn through. It can also mask the taste of a new cob. A few of my new cobs tasted nasty for the first five bowls. I will give this a go with some virgin cobs.