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Pipe & Pint has bought up several collections over the years, and in the process they've gotten hold of some of my older pipes. I was looking at these at the CORPS show, and asked Larry if I could bring a few home to post here, because I think my regular site visitors might jump at the chance to buy an unsmoked estate pipe from a few years back, especially with Christmas shopping season coming on - Basically, the more stock we have here for the holiday shopping season, the better! This piece is simply gorgeous, one of the more perfect briar bowls I've seen, and stained lightly with our red/orange tint just to jazz it up a little.

We made this pipe back in 2006 in our French workshop, and it's marked with the old grading of "06 3B", our old-style Talbert Briar logo, and "Faite en Bretagne". Also, while I have in recent years shifted mostly to ebonite for stems, this one has a handcut black acrylic bit, filed from solid block lucite. Thanks to the wonder of acrylic, it hasn't faded at all in the ensuing 5 years, and the pipe looks as new today as it did when we finished it. I should stress that this is a big pipe - Not an ODA bowl or anything, but it's made on a "+1" size scale and is much larger than the typical European-ish bamboo-shank pipes it resembles (Note the 18cm length for proportion). The bamboo shank is unlined, making it more vulnerable to breakage than the steel tube-lined ones but also allowing the bamboo to absorb, season, and color, which I prefer.