How to fill a System pipe

Here’s something old for Peterson lovers that for many of us—me, at any rate—is quite new: a System-pipe packing method that seems to have come down from Charles Peterson himself. It’s found in the two earliest catalogs, the 1896 and the 1906, where there obviously remains unmined wealth waiting to be dug out. I say this having looked at and pored over these catalogs for several years now. That this method is from Peterson himself would seem to be indicated by a few first-person pronouns found scattered through the educational pieces in these catalogs, pronouns I stumbled on when preparing my West Coast Pipe Show presentation. The packing method discovery, however, belongs to Smokingpipes’s Shane Ireland. He reviews his appropriation of the technique in an informative episode of “All Pipes Considered” that appeared back in September 2019. Here’s an edited transcript of what he said: "My first experience with the Peterson’s System design was many years ago. When I started to revisit the System, I had perfectly fine results packing it the way that I normally do, with a gravity-fill for about half of the bowl, adding another pinch with a little more pressure and then a final pinch (depending on the size of the bowl) with a little more pressure than that. "And then in Andy’s blog he had a image which told you how to clean your system pipe and it had a little thing about packing it. So I read that and I thought, “that’s really interesting because what they suggest is that when you pack your pipe, pack it more tightly and use the tip of your finger to push down on the tobacco towards the stem. "So I thought about that and I said, 'Okay, you know the way that a System pipe is engineered is true of bent pipes in general. Sometimes the draft whole can be a little bit higher than on a straight pipe and that’s just by design. And then, System pipes because of the way they’re drilled to allow for the well means that drilling angle can be a little steeper sometimes.' "The image was actually saying that you shouldn’t pack your System pipe in the normal way because you run the risk of burning it. I think that’s because back then people were a lot harder on their pipes than they are now. The result I got out of packing my System this way was an improved flavor and a slower rate of burn. "What I do is take my normal pinch of tobacco that’s going to fill about half of the chamber. I gravity fill the chamber and level it off, and then instead of going right to my second pinch, I take my finger and I press down on the front of the tobacco, that is, the tobacco that’s touching the front of the bowl.* Instead of leveling the tobacco parallel with the top of the bowl, what I'm actually doing is putting pressure in a cant…