Do this until all the tobacco is in the pipe, tight enough so that when you tip it upside down, no tobacco falls out. It’s likely you’ll need to use the small nail to poke a hole down the center to let some air in. Test the draw on the pipe at this point; it should be reminiscent of sucking soda through a straw. This is the method that I prefer, and Fashion tobacco pipe have had the most success with. We do not ship cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, or roll your own tobacco. Let’s cut right to the chase here; you can fit a lot of tobacco in this one.
The Fashion tobacco pipe word “meerschaum” means “sea foam” in German, alluding to its natural white color and its surprisingly low weight. Meerschaum is a very porous mineral that absorbs the tars and oils during the smoking process, and gradually changes color to a golden brown. Old, well-smoked meerschaum pipes are valued by collectors for their distinctive coloring.
Originally a woodworker, Tibbe quickly made the pipe better and soon decided to make corn cob smoking pipes permanently. Much like Dunhill, Vauen marks their smoking pipes with a dot on their stem. Pipes sold in Germany are marked with a white dot, while internationally sold pipes bear a grey dot.
Most, including myself, do not consider it “smoking”, in the same way I don’t consider myself an alcoholic because I have a beer once a week. It’s not an addiction, but certainly appeals to collectors and those that want to explore an incredibly diverse variety of tastes and smells. Also, pipes are made from various materials such as briar, clay, ceramics, corncob, glass, meerschaum, metal, gourd, stone, wood, bog oak and calabash. Pipes were and continue to be made of various sizes depending on what would be placed in the pipe. Because of the long history of pipes and the materials that were used to make them, they have become quite collectible. You may recall movies and television shows of Native Americans smoking pipes.
Butane lighters made specifically for pipes emit flame sideways or at an angle to make it easier to direct flame into the bowl. Torch-style lighters should never be used to light a pipe because their flames are too hot and can char the rim of the pipe bowl. Matches should be allowed to burn for several seconds to allow the sulfur from the tip to burn away and the match to produce a full flame. A naphtha fueled lighter should also be allowed to burn a few seconds to get rid of stray naphtha vapors that could give a foul taste to the smoke.
The bowls of tobacco pipes are commonly made of briar wood, meerschaum, corncob, pear-wood, rose-wood or clay. Less common materials include other dense-grained woods such as cherry, olive, maple, mesquite, oak, and bog-wood. Pipe bowls are sometimes decorated by carving, and moulded clay pipes often had simple decoration in the mould. I made a conscious effort to identify pipe smokers in my travels, as soon as I decided on this focus for today’s column. While many pipe smokers came to mind from the past, I could not find anyone and could not identify anyone that I knew who smoked a pipe today.
Well, Native Americans had pipe-smoking traditions before the arrival of Europeans in America. The 1964 Surgeon General’s report referenced earlier resulted in a boom in pipe smoking as the report claimed that pipe smokers actually lived longer than other smokers. Smoking pipe tobacco is not only harmful to the health of the user, but it is also a serious health risk to anyone exposed to its smoke. Secondhand smoke is classified as a known human carcinogen because it contains many of the harmful chemicals that are in the smoke directly inhaled by smokers. This bizarre little smoking instrument is designed to fit in the pocket of a vest, as the name implies. The bowl of the pipe is rather unique in that the chamber is actually oval shaped, and not round.