Peterson COM stamps

Last summer when I interviewed Tom Palmer I noticed, laying on his desk, an unfinished stummel with a peculiar-looking nomenclature stamp. Picking it up, I was amazed: there, in a perfectly-stamped, deep impression, was the “Peterson of Dublin” logo. It was black and looked like it had been burned into the wood. Seeing my curiosity, he told me it was made by a laser, and that Peterson was considering using it to replace hand-stamping for COMs and nomenclature. Fast forward to last week, when I got my first look at a production laser-stamped Pete on one of the Sportsman pipes coming out shortly. It’s not perfect, as you can see—the wrong shape was burned into it and the correct number had to be hand-stamped over it. I don’t mind, because that makes it a great conversation-piece, right? The “stamp”—if that’s what the laser-burned combination nomenclature/shape number will still be called—has been placed on the bottom of this 01 bowl. "The reason for that," Tony Whelan Jr. at the factory told me, "is because the stem is too short. All the smooth pipes with normal length stem will be stamped on the side of the pipe." At first I thought the laser-stamp sample bowl I saw on Tom’s desk seemed a little deeper and darker than this one, but the macro photography convinced me they’re the same. As you can see, the typography of the laser-burned stamp is a little deeper, narrower and sharper than what can be had with a traditional steel-impressed stamp. If you look closely at the various photos, you can see the laser-burned “68” below the hand-pressed “01”—the 68 is one of the shapes earmarked for the Sportsman series. Overstamp Everyone’s going to have his own opinion on whether hand-pressed stamps done the traditional way are better than laser stamps, and rather than give you mine, I’ll just lay out some of the pros and cons I expect we’ll be hearing. Let’s begin with Motto of the Luddite Faction (of which in many ways I’m a card-carrying member): “The old ways are the best ways.” Certainly they’re the ways we’ve known, and as you can see in my “Irish Whisky” photograph of K&P stamps (which will be in the forthcoming book), those nomenclature and COM stamps aren’t just pieces of steel, they’re history incarnate. If you own any of the pipes stamped with one of those depicted, you’re connected to Peterson of Dublin and the men and women who made your pipe in a very concrete and particular way—each stamp has marked thousands upon thousands of pipes. A laser-burning machine, of course, is just another piece of electronic hardware. Here today, obsolete tomorrow.   "Irish Whisky": Nomenclature Stamps at Peterson And yet, as much as I love the hand stamps, most of us would be forced to add a codicil to the Luddite’s Motto: “The old ways are the best ways, except when they’re not.” There are several problems with steel-impressed nomenclature stamping and all of them…