322. Tenon Work on an 1890-1990 Patent System Commemorative with Gary Hamilton
Athbhliain Faoi Mhaise Daoibh! HAPPY NEW YEAR This morning I welcome back Gary Hamilton, CPG. He and I met up at Ascension Coffee in the Design District of Dallas not long before Christmas and one of the topics that came up was my recent acquisition of an estate Patent System Commemorative oom paul, part of the 1990 set for which we share a mutual enthusiasm.My pipe had some turbulence and he wanted to take a look at it and see if he might do anything about it. He could, as a matter of fact, as you'll read in just a moment. First, some geeky historical information about the set I hope you'll enjoy, as it was the swan song of the Late Republic era (1969-1991), when the company was under the direction of the very capable Jimmy Nicholson and Tony "Jolly D" Dempsey. Alongside and before the Patent Commemorative set, K&P during the Late Republic era had produced the Sherlock Holmes Systems in 1990, the Original SH set in 1988-91, the Dublin Millennium set in 1988, the SH Original in 1987 and the Mark Twain in 1981. An amazing achievement for this tumultuous period when the company was set loose from the direction of the Kapp family for the first time in its history. Window and Strutcard In an interview for Smokeshop magazine, Tony Dempsey said this set wasn't a limited edition, although it was created to specially mark the occasion. The brilliance of the design aesthetic perfectly captures the zeitgeist of 1990, offering something quite original yet firmly rooted in K&P's historic design language. Interestingly, the company decided to place "Patent No. 12393"--the first patent number--on one side of the ferrule. This would be a source of confusion to later collectors, some of whom even thought these were Patent-era pipes!* The original pipe box was a dark blue-gray, as seen above, with a white rayon lining which typified the high-end boxes at this era of the company's history. Inside was a folded pipe box brochure, the kind of treasure Pete Geeks want to find in every K&P box: If you own the big Pete book, you can go to one of its early chapters and identify the exhibition medals seen in the photo. The decorative device on the pipe box front was taken from the 1906 catalog. Even the pipe socks are great: they were a kind of chamois. Note also the heavier font used on "Peterson," which to me seems to reflect the house style better than the later Dublin era's slimmed-down version. My original smooth set is illustrated on pp. 180-81 of the Pete book, where you can also see why Gary wanted to create a new tenon extension for the straight System of his set: notice the tenon only extends to the end of the shank. This short tenon creates a problem in the chamber's straight System engineering, inasmuch as the air hole is drilled in the bottom of the chamber and the tenon should extend…