Ferndown Pipe
As I mentioned some days ago in a post here, this month I posted a timelessly shaped new Ferndown pipe by Les Wood. This week I took to smoking the pipe, and thought that a report of my first impressions would be appropriate here.
The pipe is quite a bit larger than those I normally smoke both in overall size and the volume of the tobacco chamber. This has caused me to feel the need for a more gradual break-in process, likely unnecessary, but to ensure that the tobacco was consumed by fire to the very bottom of the bowl I took to smoking those first couple of bowls with only the slightest amount of tobacco in the bottom. This has worked quite well, and careful examination shows that I have wonderfully even cake forming in the lowest 25% of the bowl. Upon that success I’ve begun to break in the rest of the bowl, enjoying my first full bowl last evening.
To my eye this Ferndown pipe stands at the pinnacle of quality, and given the price range of Ferndown pipes must be considered a superb value. The classic shape is perfectly executed, the blast quite well done with only the smallest troubling spot that likely no one else would notice. The nomenclature is crisp and clear, the stem work obviously done with great care, and as seems to be the case with every Les Wood pipe I’ve closely examined the silverwork is flawless. Topping everything off the chamber is properly bored, and the air hole enters dead center in the very bottom of the bowl, as it should.
A pipe that so well exemplifies the English Style begs I think for English Style tobacco, so I’ve selected Dunhill’s Early Morning Pipe for this break-in process, and this pipe will likely regularly burn even heavier English tobaccos.
One final thing I should mention even though it may reflect poorly on myself is the functionality of the mount. I have read, though I do not know if it is true, that the military mount was created by soldiers in WWI out of necessity. That all too frequently a soldier’s pipe would be broken in the shank or tenon while he was suffering the horrors of the trenches. That to effect a repair he would carve two cartridge cases to come up with an effective but crude way to mount the stem to shank, the precursor to the military mount we know today, and that this form of mounting was adopted by pipemakers to serve those smokers who’s activity was highly likely to break a plain shank or tenon. As I mentioned above, I do not know if this story is true, but I do own a number of pieces of ‘trench art,’ artistic and functional items made out of cartridge casings during WWI, so I presume that it could in fact be the case.
In any event, to make a long story short, last night I dropped the pipe. A nasty drop from a high distance onto a hard surface. The mounting worked perfectly. Stem separated from bowl with no damage and indeed with not even so much as a dent anywhere on the pipe. What could have been a sad moment instead proved to be one of no consequence whatsoever.
