It's time to update this page. I lashed the earlier essay together four years ago. (It's here if you're new to the site.) How time flies as one ages: blink, and a year has passed.

  I'm over fifty, and still wearing jeans. Worn, but not worn out. I had a go at making pipes fulltime for two years, and had to go back to pounding nails to avoid starvation. For the past two years I've been building/carving/crafting pipes on my days off when the weather isn't congenial for motorcycling. I'd have to get a lot more dough for my pipes to pass up a day's riding.

  I continue to experiment with species other than briar. To date I've built pipes out of cherry, apple, olive, hawthorne, rock maple burl, black palm, myrtle, black walnut, English walnut,curly ash, ebony, apricot, pawlonia, bocote, madrone burl, western long-leaf maple burl, oak, red maple, honey mesquite, elm, box elder burl, Russian olive, mahogany, beech, coffee burl, and black cherry burl. An article I wrote on my early 'research' was published in the April 2005 issue "The Pipe Collector", the newsletter of The North American Society of Pipe Collectors. It can be found here.

     Many thanks to all of you who have bought my pipes over the last four years.