FdP Pipe Adventures

Today's pipe photo is an entertainingly weird morta churchwarden done on the sidelines of the FdP pipe work. I'm not quite sure what will become of it yet - I had a request several months ago for a smooth morta that was "not a pot", but odds are that this is a bit more unusual than the fellow had in mind. In any case, it will most likely go to Pipe & Pint if he doesn't get it, nor anyone else buy it direct. It seems very seasonal, somehow, though - Something to smoke beside a Christmas tree and a crackling fire.
Edit: Indeed, the fellow ended up buying a different morta from me, so this churchwarden is available - The price is 225 € HT, or 269 € with VAT if one lives in the EU.

The FdP pipe adventures continue! I've just finished another five and emailed various folks, and I hope to shortly have at least three more of the larger, plateau briar versions with the natural plateau tops to offer on the newsgroup. By my count I've got about eight or nine more to do, depending on how the current sales go. As expected, several of the fellows who requested pipes have simply vanished - no reply emails, no contact - so I've crossed them off the list (Merciless, yes, but I just don't have the time to try and chase people down). The schedule has had to be accelerated a good bit in order to get all the pipes out by Christmas, since I really don't want to still be working on these things during the holidays. Right now I'm pretty much working on the schedule of - Email photos, wait one day, and if there's no reply, email them to the next fellow.

The only real sticking point remaining are the horn stems, which are nearly exhausted. I think I have perhaps three or four usable stems left, unless I can somehow modify some of our other horn stems to a saddle shape (reshaping a tapered stem to a saddle can be done, but it's a lot of extra work and it requires a really thick saddle stem to allow proper shaping of the round portion of a saddle.... which just means some digging through the horn stems will be required). But, most folks have been happy to get ebonite stems instead, so all seems OK there.

On another subject, Blogger has upgraded my account to their new Blogger Beta, which seems much more reliable to post with, but also seems to have produced the unfortunate effect that my archive links don't work now. One can still backtrack through the postings by clicking on individual post titles, but the 'October 2005, November 2005, etc' links no longer work. Grrr. No idea what caused this, but I don't have the time to hunt through their help FAQs now - it will just have to wait a few weeks.