Author: Mark Irwin

I’ve been meaning to talk about the Kildare Patch line for quite awhile now, and with James Foster’s Pipes Magazine article on Peterson’s acquisition by Laudisi appearing today, now seemed an opportune time. I say that because he and I chatted last Sunday morning over coffee & pipes and one of the things that came up is talk on the various forums and in social media about Peterson quality control. The Kildare Patch illustrates the long-standing realities of Peterson production methods and for that reason makes a great case-in-point about what pipe smokers can expect when they acquire entry, mid-grade or high-grade Peterson lines. The Peterson Pipe Book carries this entry for the Kildare: Kildare  1965 –  First issue of line with matt finish smooth pipe in the Classic Range, P-Lip and fishtail. Second issue c. 1979 as Kildare Patch, with rusticated patches on pipe surface. Third issue 2010, brown matt, P-Lip or fishtail, no band. Fourth issue 2011– , burgundy sandblast, nickel army mount, fishtail, exclusive to Smokingpipes.com. See Etched. Peterson wasn’t ever one of the largest pipe-makers in the world—I think Rossi in the Varese province of northern Italy may hold that title, with something like 400 workers at the peak of their production—but like other factories, Peterson has always graded bowls in a particular shape from highest to lowest. Now the Kildare, and the one you’re looking at in particular, is a great example of a typical entry-grade Classic Range Pete, comparable perhaps to today's Aran line. While this pipe was drilled with a System reservoir, it didn’t make the cut for Standard System grade. You can see there’s a putty fill on obverse, but then the craftsmen ran into serious issues putty couldn’t deal with at the base of the bowl and maybe on the rim. There seems to be three possible solutions to the problem—first, toss the bowl into the fire. Not going to happen, because the company paid money for that bowl and needs to make a profit on it. Second, relegate the bowl to a lower marque owned by the same company, but branded differently so as not to confuse consumers with the quality of your premium marque. This was common practice for a number of factories and accounts for some otherwise obscure maker’s marks on a lot of twentieth-century pipes. But it won't happen for Peterson because they're the only pipe-maker in Ireland, and they never thought to make lower marques for the different qualities of their pipes, but instead have always made pipes for the different “qualities” of people who bought them. (More about this in the book.) Still with me? Let’s take a pause and look at some bowl statistics in order to understand the third solution. Let’s say Peterson orders 500 bowls of shape 4. That’s the bowl number assigned to catalog shapes 4S, 309, XL339 and XL339S back in 1979.  So, they sort them by grade and size. Being wood, some come out a bit larger than standard…