I won't stand for fills in the pipes I buy. With all the options available to makers, it's simply unacceptable.
Good luck with that. You'll need it.
At the risk of you feeling insulted, it's pretty clear on this end (no opinion involved) that you don't understand the price/volume relation you think (in a vacuum of information) you do. This is why :
Pipe makers in the Silver Age (Gold, by most accounts, was pre-1939, by and large, with some exceptions ; WWII disrupted the supply of trained-up-from-youth craftsmen and most concerns had to replace their labor force with housewives when they started back up again) adhered to the No-Fills-In-A-First standard from tradition. It was peer pressure. In the face of a steadily declining market, this did them in. With the prices they could get (Dunhill and freehand Charatans excepted) for their best-grained firsts and solid-but-nothin'-fancy lines of others held down by their own competition, they had to come out with numerous lines of seconds with fills and private label for chains & shops because this is what their briar supplies allowed them to turn out. Figures from back then were
around 3% of production were Firsts (Cleans).
Some of these, like a "Drury Lane" apple in front of me as I type this, except for the kind & number of fills you guys are showing, are otherwise spectacularly nice pipes. (Drury Lane, for you bargain hunters, was the road in front of the old Comoy plant). But with everybody else doing the same thing, and some pretty tasteless attempts at "new/stylish/contemporary" not turning things around as hoped, they pretty much all went down together. Now, the old brand pipes are just names stamped on factory production from (initially) Swansea or (later) France &/or wherever else there's excess production going cheap.
Not before the fills started showing up though, out of sheer necessity. One great-tasting & smoking, later-but-not-final-production (new in 1974) Sasieni 4-Dot sandblast I traded off when I belatedly noticed that much of one whole side of it was putty under the stain. (News Flash : fills in sandblasted/rusticated pipes are much easier to hide).
Savinelli never pretended to not fill theirs, no matter what the grade (they're to be found on Autographs, Linea Pius & DeLuxes). Which is one reason why I avoided them, but that's neither here nor there. Peterson joined the parade of necessity-- now, a few specified lines of theirs are (or at least were a few years back) guaranteed fill-free ; their other lines may or may not be (and there is a luck-of-the-draw factor). Stanwell started out toeing the line (one favorite here is an old Stanwell shape with a small fill in the shank branded "Made in Denmark") but this changed, out of the same necessity : rising costs and relatively fixed retail prices. (People used to getting a nicely grained & made English "name" first for around $30 running into the next one @ $70 a few years later got angry and balked. I know I did).
When you're up against a price ceiling like that, in the face of continually rising costs, you either lower previous standards, find a niche you can get by in, or pack it in.
So who are the holdouts ? Not who you'd expect. According to Marty Pulvers (who's handled & sold more of them in 40 years than you'll ever see if you go to shows the rest of your life), Danish pipes are no strangers to fills -- and sandblasts especially. (Yes, Virginia, it's true -- even Bo Nordh did it). They just do it very, very well. And the same is true of some high-ranking American, Italian (&c.) makers.
The bottom line is that when you're doing it for a living, when you spend hours making a pipe and a void shows up that you can't improvise around, you can either pitch it and lose the time you have in it, or you can disguise it and make enough to eat that day. Same problem if you (were) a factory depending on quality volume.
(Stanwells from Denmark, RIP
).
Yes, if you're a high-end guy, the very most select blocks will have few
er voids and sandpits than the Pretty-Good-to-Excellent grade that Stanwell was famous for for years. Making it
less likely that your Bo Ivarsson or your Nina Chonowich has a little disguised booger in it somewhere. But if you think it's a guarantee, I'm here as your friend(ly) to tell you that
1) it's not one. And that
2) Given the current realities of "the market," unless you're a well established maker who's good at rusticating/blasting away problems and getting by on the lower prices you can get for them, that's about the only way it can be. For some this is viable. Others figure what people don't know won't hurt them. And some of them seem to be doing rather well, as a rule. Possibly better than not a few of the straight-arrows.
Then again, I may be full of shit.
FWIW
:face: