It is no easy task to transform a rough piece of natural briar into a fine briar pipe—a pipe that that will smoke well and remain an object of lasting beauty. Skilled craftsmen plus the best modern machin­ery are required to create today's high-quality pipe.

Before the development of the power-turning lathe, all pipes were made by hand. Pipe making was a carver's art, passed on for generations from father to son. Early briar pipes were ornately carved and as abundantly decorated as their forerunners, the clays and the meerschaums. Hand-carved pipes are still available today from most pipe manufacturers. These pipes come in various shapes and designs, depicting the heads of famous people, or animals, or many kinds of objects. But since the end of the First World War, the trend has been away from ornamented hand-carved designs.

Although the pipe-carving art is still practiced, most of today's pipe smokers prefer the perfectly turned bowl, sleek finish, and scientific design of briar pipes made with power machinery. This does not mean that automatic machines turn out modern quality pipes by the million. On the contrary, it is highly unlikely that quality pipe manufacture will ever be automated.

It takes as many as eighty individual operations to transform a briar block into a finished pipe. Skilled craftsmen, with years of ex­perience and time-tested judgment, control each of these operations. The machines they use merely provide the power and pre­cision to produce a perfect briar pipe — something no hand craftsmen could ever hope to achieve.

CUTTING THE BURL

The creation of a briar pipe begins not in the factory but in the region where the briar grows. When a digger has unearthed a briar burl, he chops away the inferior portions; then he brings the burl to a sawmill.

The men who process the briar first must dry up all the moisture within the burls. They place the freshly cut briar in long, shallow trenches and cover it with damp earth and straw. This permits the briar to mellow slowly without drying out too quickly. It is said that the best briar burls are those from plants which remain in the ground for several years. This presumably allows the mois­ture to dry out completely.

Skilled workers then use high-speed circular saws to slice each burl into several briar pipe pieces. After each slice is cut away, it is examined for cracks, flaws, or inferior wood. Each slice is then segmented into a number of more or less perfect briar blocks, roughly pipe-shaped, and called ebauchons. A large prime burl will yield up to fifty briar blocks. From each block, a single briar pipe will be made.

Not all parts of the burl are of the best quality. The section where the soft, pulpy briar trunk passes through the burl is con­sidered inferior. In fact, the trunk section within the burl differs only slightly from ordinary lumber. Thus, the choicest briar pipe blocks are those cut from the sides of the burl, where the wood is hard and tightly grained. For this reason, some quality pipe manufacturers buy entire burls from the growers and cut the burl in their own workshops. Such procedure insures that the manufacturer's best pipes will be made from only the choicest wood.

Standard shape for a               Partly-formed briar pipe shaped
briar block                               by machine, so as to simplify
hand carving

It takes at least forty years for a burl to grow to a size large enough so that pipes carved from it do not incorporate the poorer wood of the trunk. Therefore, the choicest burls are the venerable ones (often more than one hundred years old), possessing the right size and sturdiness. Four-year-old, or even twelve-year-old, briar burls usually yield inferior pipes. A briar pipe made of briar cut from inside the burl (not including the trunk) will usually pos­sess superb grain and be free from flaws.

CURING THE BRIAR BLOCKS

Briar is wood and, like all wood when freshly cut, contains mois­ture in the form of sap. Ordinary green wood, such as a pine board, may be cured simply by allowing its sap to dry. When pine lumber is made into a table or chair, it never experiences intense heat. As a result, it gives satisfactory performance. But a piece of briar made into a pipe becomes, in fact, a small furnace. As a result, it must be treated differently.

If the sap were allowed to remain in the briar, it would melt when subjected to heat, and would soon be forced to the surface of the bowl, where it would appear as a sticky mess. Some of the sap would also be consumed along with the tobacco inside the bowl, and the smoker would experience a bitter, unpleasant taste.

To remove the tar and resins which have hardened with the briar pipe blocks, the briar is boiled from twenty-four to forty-eight hours, or longer. At the end of that time, the tars and resins have been replaced with water, and the water is then allowed to evap­orate. The drying must be done slowly, otherwise the blocks will split and become useless.

The briar pipe blocks are dried for a minimum of three months, and up to three years in certain cases. For this entire period they are kept in a moisture-free room at normal temperature, protected from the weather, but not subject to artificial heat. The blocks are then placed in special drying rooms, and air is circulated over the entire surface of each block. Over a period of several weeks, workers slowly raise the temperature in these rooms. The briar pipe operation is com­plete when the wood is bone dry.

The blocks are then graded and bundled into burlap bags for shipment, each bag containing from sixty to eighty-five dozen blocks.

When the dried blocks reach the pipe factory, they must pass through the hands of skilled inspectors, who grade the blocks according to size and possible flaws. Some surface defects may extend deeply into the block; other buried flaws may not be noticeable until after the block is cut. Men who have worked with briar for many years usually do the inspecting. They save the manufacturer the expense of shaping a pipe that will later have to be discarded.

SHAPING THE BOWL

The first actual shaping operation performed on the block is that of fashioning the bowl. Specially adapted woodworking lathes, equipped with extremely hard metal cutters not easily dulled by tough briarwood, are used for this job. Nevertheless, the briar is so hard that these cutters must frequently be sharpened. The block, held firmly in a vise, is pushed slowly onto a high­speed revolving bit—which looks somewhat like an old-fashioned lemon squeezer, with two wing blades attached. The revolving bit bores the inside of the bowl and shapes the outside at the same time, down to the level of the shank. This operation demands the utmost skill. The bowl must be centered and bored to the pre­cise, correct depth. The shape of the bowl and the thickness of its wall at various points must be scientifically proportioned ac­cording to the weight and design of the briar pipe.

SHAPING THE BRIAR PIPE

The metal model on the frazing machine determines the style and size of the finished pipe. Practically all pipe manufacturers follow the generally accepted styles, such as billiard, pear, apple, Dublin, and bulldog. However, each pipe manufacturer includes small variations to make his pipe shape distinctive.

As the briar pipe takes shape on the frazing machine, a skilled crafts­man with a sharp eye watches for defects, which appear suddenly as the surface of the wood is cut away. If the flaw is shallow, it may be removed in future finishing steps. If it is deep, the pipe will have to be scrapped. A briar pipe maker proud of his workmanship never stamps his name on an imperfect pipe.

BORING THE SHANK

After the shank and bowl have been cut to shape, the next step is to bore a hole in the shank large enough to take the tenon—the part of the stem that fits into the shank—one of the most delicate and important operations in making the briar pipe. If the direction of the cut is not true, the walls of the shank will lack uniform thick­ness, and the briar pipe will be out of balance. Also, the hole may fail to pierce the bowl at its exact bottom point. Shank-drilling is a precise task that only the most skilled briar pipe makers can perform.

A hand-operated, electrically powered drill is used to bore an air chamber in the center of the shank, up to a depth of about one inch. The next step is more difficult. Every piece of briar has hard and soft spots, straight grain and twisted grain, the result of the briar plant's struggle during its growth. Briar is not a homo­geneous material, like plastic or metal. It takes a sensitive hand to detect when the drill is penetrating the shank too rapidly, due to a soft spot, or when it is boring too slowly, due to a hard spot or particle of sand embedded in the briar. A twist in the grain direction might deflect the drill, causing it to bore off-center.

 

The briar blocks from which briar pipes will be shaped must first be air-dried and cured under controlled heat for several months (center, top). Blocks are graded as to shape and size (center, bottom). The bowl is then partially turned by high-speed rotating cutters (left; right, tup). The cutting tool turns the inside and outside of the bowl simultaneously. The turned block is clamped in a frazing machine which shapes the shank and lower half of bowl (right, bottom). Block is forced against frazing cutters to duplicate a pre-selected briar pipe shape.

 Drilling the shank of the briar bowl is a delicate operation requiring skilled hands. The tenon hole is first drilled (left, top) to accomodate the tenon of the stem. The air hole is then drilled through the shank into (he bowl (left, bottom). The tenon hole is also reamed to thousandth-of-an-inch tolerance to insure a tight-fitting stem, which is then fitted (left, bottom). Sanding wheels of various grades of sandpaper then give a smooth finish (right, bottom). The bowl surfaces of selected briar pipes are then hand-carved with high-speed cut­ters (right, top).

After sanding, the pipes must pass a rigorous inspection (left). Pipes with undesirable flaws, cracks, or irregularities are rejected. The briar pipes are stained to bring out the full grain and color of the briar (right, top). They may then be polished with a special preparation. A final buffing operation (right, bottom) imparts a lustrous sheen to the fin­ished briar pipe. The inside of the bowl is caked with a charcoal mixture.

A specially designed machine routs a tiny groove in the stem (left), into which the pipe-maker's emblem will be inserted. The final inspection of the finished briar pipes is made by Carl Weber (right). He evaluates the briar pipes according to the beauty of their grain, the absence of flaws, the true bore of the air hole, and the quality of the finish. In determining the quality of each briar pipe, Carl Weber draws on more than fifty years of experience in pipe manufacture.

Photos Taken in the Weber Pipe Factory

PIPE STEMS

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