shape 3312

Oíche Shamhna Shona Daoibh! A Happy Samhain / Halloween to all! Paul Combs, CPG, sends everyone his greetings with this wonderful pumpkin with the Irish Trinity Knot which he carved. Below it, his 1898 shape 4 with the House Pipe stem!   Most of us think of the K&P shape 5b and its big brother the XL5b (or XL11 in the SH line) as the beginning and end of Kapp & Peterson’s calabash briar catalog. The shape was designed by Paddy Larrigan, Peterson’s master craftsman, around 1984 to replace his c. 1979 bent dublin System and Classic Range shape 5a (a true bent dublin), which didn’t carry enough weight in the System shank version for a proper reservoir. As good a pipe as the 5a is, the 5b has gone on to become a standard in the System and Classic ranges. The XL305 with its first-iteration wide-shoulder stem, c. 1985 I like the the way the shoulders of the stem are scaled to the shank, just a bit larger in diameter in fact. If you’ve companioned the 5, XL5, XL305 or XL315 (its US designation for many years) or XL11, you know why it’s so popular: the flared rim makes it extraordinarily easy to grasp. Unlike so many shapes which are visually pleasing but difficult to hold, this one’s a joy. The SH XL11 first appeared as a solo commemorative in 1987 with a saddle stem, giving it a bit more of the calabash look. The saddle stem had disappeared by the mid-1990s. Looking for another hit like the Mark Twain commemorative, someone at K&P noticed that 1987 was the centenary of Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes novel. The light bulb went off. That’s one way to tell the story. Another way might be that when Larrigan redesigned shape 5 in 1984 the company was already thinking about using the 5b calabash shape for the upcoming special release. Like the MT and the 4AB, it turns out the SH Original has a predecessor in the catalog. Whether or not Paddy Larrigan was aware of it or not is anyone’s guess, although numbering among his contemporaries at the factory were a number of other highly-skilled craftsmen. It may be that one of them or Larrigan himself remembered the old 3312, a shape I’d never seen before its appearance at Clayton’s Pipe Shop not long ago. 3312: Bent dublin? Swan neck dublin? Calabash? Gorgeous. We were fortunate that fellow Pete Geek Lance Dahl acquired the pipe so that we could learn a bit more about it. Lance told me he would call the shape ia bent dublin or swan neck dublin. Whatever we call it, it’s one of those shapes that is fairly jaw-dropping, not least because it’s so very rarely seen in contemporary shapes. The 3000 shape group, at least based on what we know at present, seems to date to the Irish Free State era (1922-1937) or perhaps from the end of the Patent to the…