171. The St. Patrick’s Day XXIV for 2020
IPSD is February 20th. Please read the note at the end of the blog on how we can celebrate! If the St. Patrick’s Day commemorative has flagged a bit in inventiveness from time to time over its 22 year history, things have certainly been building in the past three years: 2018’s brilliant Dublin-era parting shot of sterling-mount, yellow acrylic with imbedded aluminum P; 2019’s unheard-of SPD System, and now the artisan-blast St. Patrick’s Day XXIV for 2020—“XXIV” as in twenty-four shapes, that is. I can hear some taking exception to my use of “artisan blast,” which is why I’m not only including a gallery of all 24 shapes on offer, but double-shots of a few. As Sykes Wilford explained on the release of the 20th Anniversary SPC Peterson small batch in January, sandblasted bowls are separated into four grades, dependent on grain structure and blast depth. As seen in an earlier post, Peterson has three craftsmen who, among their other skills, comprise Peterson’s sandblasting team: Willy Murray, who grades the bowls, Michail Galimov, who I think does much of the blasting, and Jonathan Fields, factory manager, who does the rest. Take a look at this double shot of shape 107 and you can see what I’m talking about (remember you can click on the photos to make them larger). At $90 to $100, the SPD2020 offers one-of-a-kind pipes. I realize that every pipe is in many senses unique because of its grain structure, briar hardness, curing and the specificities of its manufacture. But what I’m talking about here is that when you go to pick out anSPD2020 and say you want a B10, well, no two are going to have the same blast pattern. Old Pete fans know this was not always the case. Outsourced blasting for many years looked almost like it had been stamped on the wood because the bowl was laid on one side, blasted, and then turned over and blasted again for a shorter period of time. Then toward the end of the Dublin era, the pattern was varied, now going from the front bottom of the bowl toward the top and back. But if you look at those pipes they still can look almost identical, because they were all blasted the same way in an assembly-line fashion. The only way to get spectacular blasts during the Dublin era was to find a Pete made in collaboration with Mario Lubinski for the Italian market. Those, I confess, could be absolutely breath-taking, like this XL21 silver cap from 1991 (and yes, those waves go all the way around the bowl): But when Michail and Jonathan step up to the blasting booth, they’ve got their game on and are looking to see what they can make of each bowl, and the wood responds to them in unique ways. Look at these two shape 999s for instance: The semi-matte green over black stain this year is also fascinating and unlike anything from Peterson’s previous green efforts. Sometimes it seems…