Jerry Eger

PSA THE TEXAS PIPE SHOW IS ALMOST HERE! Friday and Saturday, November 14th & 15th.Peterson Pipe Notes will have a table this year with books, tintackers, estate Petes from Ken Sigel, Gary Hamilton, and myself, all under the supervision of our resident den mother Gigi. See Texaspipeshow.com for more info.   Sona Oíche Shamhna! Happy Hallowe’en! I’ve known Pete Geeks interested enough in the long and fascinating history of System Clones to collect a few, but no one has yet come forward confessing to harboring a Franken Pete.  Not on purpose, anyway. If you've never heard of them, frankenpipes lie at the ectoplasmic end of pipe restoration, named after the mad scientist who stitched together the monster in Mary Shelley's celebrated 1818 novel. A frankenpipe then, can be defined as “a pipe made from spare parts,” and has been around as long as there have been broken pipes.  I first ran across them in some of the grisly restorations done in Steve Laug's early days at Reborn Pipes. A Franken Pete is almost always created using the bowl of a System or Army mount pipe, as I explained in my first post on this topic back in 2018 (#112).  As soon as you have a pipe that readily disassembles (hot or cold) into (somewhat) interchangeable bowls and mouthpieces, you’ve created the possibility for design aberrations. And that’s how Franken Petes are made. Sometimes they’re easy to spot. Sometimes only a Pete Freek with the heightened powers gained by ingesting Tlachtga Celtic fire can spot them, as this one here, which I seem to have been the first one to go public in documenting in my books and posts: The B Wear-Gap stem on a Standard System: really, Sam? Mark Twain used his pipes mercilessly. In the photo above he's got a B First Quality (De Luxe) stem pushed into a 2nd or 3rd Quality bowl. Sometimes I get an email asking me “Is this Pete right? It doesn’t look right. Is this right?" about a particular System or army mount.  It never is, but part of the joy of being a Pete Geek is learning to spot these monster in kapnismological form. Not from Muppet Labs, that's for sure. Sometimes they make us look a little closer, wondering what’s going on with the pipe. That was the case with this System Gary Hamilton sent me a while back. At first you might be thinking, "Wow! How cool! An old System I've never seen before." Then you move in for a closer look and something's off. It's the kind of pipe that if you took a sniff of the chamber you'd doubtless pass out, and maybe not wake up. And finally you get it: this thing was obviously smoked by Charles Laughton in Paramount’s grisly Island of Lost Souls (1932)--which I can't even watch anymore. It's just too . . . sick. To intentionally seek out Franken Petes is like digging up decaying body parts for fun or inviting your "friends" over for roadkill ragout, something Vincent Price might…