Peterson staining process

Master craftsman Martin O’Brien entered service with Peterson on Thursday the 6th of April 1972, not many months after the move to the then-suburban area of Sallynoggin in Dun Laoghaire (pronounced dun larry). As he approaches his 50th year with Kapps—a badge of honor he will share with many Peterson craftsmen and women—I thought we might honor him with a look at what he does for Peterson fans everywhere. Where did you begin service? I began in the papering area, but after five or six years I began having trouble with my eyes, getting double vision. The optician said it had to do with the nature of the job and I’d need to give it up. So that left me with two options: move to staining or say goodbye to the factory, so I moved to staining and I’ve been doing that for about forty years now and enjoyed every day of it. What is your earliest memory of the factory? When I first started, we still had bowl turning in house—it was done by Hollebrand.* The bowls would come from their area rough and we’d have to first sand them with rough paper, then smooth paper, before they were ready for staining. [When the bowls come to Peterson now, only finish papering is necessary.] What percentage of the bowls did Hollebrand turn here in Sallynoggin? I’d say about 90%. And when I started in staining around 1978, we used to stain 50 gross of Standard Systems a week [that’s 7,200 a week, 360,000 in a 50-week or one year period]. Then of course we lost the bowl-turning in the early ’80s and saw a lot of redundancies in the late ’80s. I could have taken redundancy then, but it was the only job I’d ever known, and I liked it—and I still like it to this day! How does the hand staining process work? The pipe gets two coats of stain. The first coat stains the grain, and it’s papered off.  The black stain—the first coat—is for the background or grain definition. But you’ve got to have a bowl with good grain to begin with. Martin using Paddy Larrigan's "flapper" machine Then the black is taken off, using a machine called "the flapper" that Paddy Larrigan invented—it takes off the stain with nylon brushes without removing wood from the bowl, which a papering machine would do. After the first coat of black then the second coat is applied and burned in, the color depending on what line the pipe will be in. Following that, the second coat is removed on the papering machine. Removing the second coat on the papering machine   The black-under-brown contrast stain on a classic Irish Sterling Army 68, which hasn't changed a bit since its debut in the late 1970s. How do you do a Natural stain? Nothing goes under, it’s not a contrast process. Just a very light stain, one coat. That’s it. The grain will take more of the stain and stand…