Silver Gray and Peterson

“It’s like there’s nothing between me & the tobacco.” —Shane Ireland, on the NAP Reproduction Mouthpiece Early Saturday evening, November 2nd, just after the West Coast Pipe Show closed for the day at the Palace Station hotel and casino, several members of the NAP reproduction vetting group met in the old buffet room to talk about their experiences with Charles Peterson’s NAP Patent System pipe. L to R: Andy Camire, Todd Becker, Shane Ireland and Rick Newcombe The group included Silver Gray and Brad Pohlmann, the artisans responsible for re-creating the NAP mouthpiece; “Apostle of Pipes” Rick Newcombe, author of In Search of Pipe Dreams (2006) and Still Searching for Pipe Dreams (2013); Todd Becker, dba Deadmanspipes and fellow Pete Freek; Andy Camire, long-time member of the Sherlock Holmes Pipe Club of Boston; and James Foster, aka “Pylorns” on the web, writer for PipesMagazine.com and founder of the Texas Pipe Show. Shane Ireland, Director of Smokingpipes.com, received his own commissioned NAP at the show and also joined us, as well as several guests who just wanted to hear what the NAP is all about. The conversation naturally fell into two parts—the vetting group’s experiences smoking the NAP, followed by an extensive Q&A with Silver Gray and Brad Pohlmann about the engineering of the stems. First Impressions: Smoking the NAP Patent Silver: This was my first time smoking a Peterson, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to get Brad’s and mine done in time for the show. But I made time to do it. And my experience is that with the Peterson as a brand new pipe, I put a half bowl in it and smoked it right to the bottom. And then I ran another bowl through it, and t smoked right to the bottom. And I’m not a right-to-the-bottom kind of girl. I usually dump out the last third because I don’t like the taste of it because it gets strong at that point. But I was able to smoke it down no issue whatsoever. I am sold on this button because I think it made all the difference for me. Brad:  I have  a Peterson 314 stummel my mother bought at a garage sale years ago, without a mouthpiece years ago. And I had a cheap, acrylic mouth piece made for it. As you can see, I’ve replaced it with the NAP mouthpiece. And I just finished two bowls back-to-back during the show today, and this pipe has never smoked better. I find that the NAP mouthpiece invites you to sip the smoke far more [than a traditional mouthpiece]. And because you can’t put a pipe cleaner down through it while you’re smoking it, the NAP forces you to take full advantage of the inherent design of the pipe as far as taking advantage of the military mount and absorbing the excess moisture if that happens during the smoke. My first impressions are of the way the mouth fills with smoke: it’s evenly distributed across the…