Replacement stem for an uber-grade German pipe (Joura)

[LatakiaLover]

Karl Heinz Joura is a German carver who makes only super-high grade pipes. They are all smooths, and none have flaws. (He just tosses the block and starts over when a flaw appears).

This one has 360-degree ruler-straight grain. It's also rather small (about 5 inches), and is its owner's go-to "smoking machine." Great taste, easy handling, etc.

The stem bore the brunt of being part of a favorite pipe, though, and finally needed replacing. The owner said the original had been both narrowed a little and the button shortened several years ago, but he was now over his "thinner is better" phase, and wanted the original dimensions restored for the replacement.

T'was a tricky one to do without touching the shank, because it flared on both the x and y axis, plus the shank was short (leaving little room to work), but so it goes with many of the Northern European uber grades. Everything is about flow, especially with the Germans.

[W.Pastuch]

That's a very nice stem George, great job, as always.
By now everybody knows you can make a nice stem, how about you post something you fucked up for a change? )

As to the super-uber-high-gradeness of Joura's pipes... Well, they're pretty good, but in that same category of "non-danish, simple shapes, great grain, consistently recognizable style" I think Baldo Baldi is more appealing to me. Mr Joura seems to think that decent straight grain on a simple pipe is enough to price it at 12k euros and I'm not sure I agree. Of course I'm not criticizing his work, I respect the man and I hope he finds buyers for all his pipes (there seem to quite a lot of them on the market compared to other artisans in that price range).

Also this-
via Imgflip Meme Maker

[LatakiaLover]

I agree with you concerning Karlo's body of work. My little intro was just a distillation of what Scott Thile put on his Pipedia page to save people looking it up. He does indeed get the BIG bucks, in any event.

As for posting something I've fucked up, I understand your sentiment, but I simply don't. (Haven't yet, anyway.) Being reliable in that way is as important to the uber-collectors as the work itself. Some of those guys would send their children in for a heart transplant before they'd mail off their prized pipes to get cut on, I think, and gaining their trust comes only from NEVER making mistakes.

(Now that I said that I'll probably drop a Nordh into a paper shredder tomorrow , but so far, so good.)

[pipedreamer]

Incredible George.I should say Masterful!

[andrew]

Nice work George.

[andrew]

That is some angel hair grain. Geez.

[Charl]

Angel hair? Good one, Andrew. I think I'm going to steal that phrase!

[calsbeek]

when you do something like this, do you clone the shank out of a different piece of briar and fit the new stem that way?

Or are you shaping the stem entirely by eye and/or measurement?

beautiful

[LatakiaLover]

when you do something like this, do you clone the shank out of a different piece of briar and fit the new stem that way?

No. Doing that would be twice the labor and wouldn't work. Creating a false, "sacrificial" shank that you could scrub some material off of while shaping a stem that was plugged into it would mean the stem wouldn't be level with the real shank when you switched it back.

Or are you shaping the stem entirely by eye and/or measurement?

Yes. Procedure and tool-wise it's a weird, adaptive, iterative process that varies from specimen to specimen. The only way some shapes can be made wouldn't work at all for others. Probably the only way to learn it would be over time, apprentice-style. Video and photo articles could only cover the basics, and the Devil is in the Details more for replacement stem making than any other thing I know.

Collectable and high grade replica stem making, that is. (If all you want to do is return tobacco access devices to service, that can be done as crudely as your customers will tolerate.)