Sebastian Heck Smooth Wide Shank Bulldog w/ Antique Bakelite Handmade Briar Pipe, New

Description

Sebastian Heck is part of younger generation of highly skilled artisans to have emerged from Germany in recent years. Based in Heidelberg, Heck took up pipe smoking—and, ultimately, pipe-making—as part of a conscious effort toward slowing down in an otherwise constantly accelerating modern world. Like many pipe makers, Heck took his first steps into the craft as a restorer of estate and heirloom pieces, which in time brought with it an expansion of his workshop and the tools housed within it. With this as a base, creating new pipes of his own was a natural progression. Heck’s development has been greatly influenced by the Danish and German schools of pipe design, and has included time spent learning directly from fellow German artisans, such as Dirk Heinemann.

Bakelite is a genuinely fascinating material, with such a grand story to its invention and adoption that case studies on the subject would later become foundational to the history of technology as an academic discipline (if interested, I recommend simply diving straight into Wiebe Bijker’s Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs). In fact, one could probably write a very interesting study of its use in pipes, which has followed a similar trajectory to its non-pipe uses. Just as in the non-pipe world, it took a good few years after Leo Baekeland patented Bakelite 1909 for it to be utilized in pipe making. But in time, one could buy a pipe with a proudly marketed genuine Bakelite mouthpiece from a number of major vendors, including KB&B, while other companies came up with synthetic resins of their own, like Redmanol, which were put to similar use. Bakelite was big in the interwar years, both in pipes and elsewhere, before falling out of fashion in the decades after—again, in pipes and in its other spheres of use. More recently, Bakelite is “in” once again, having been rediscovered as a nifty material for use in accents and mouthpieces. Todd Johnson and his milieu certainly played a strong part in its revival, though there are few who have done as much in that regard as Micah Cryder of Yeti Pipes. This pipe, from Sebastian Heck, is one of two pipes with a definite Yeti influence to them in the German artisan’s latest batch. This one is a beautifully grained, wide shank Dublin rendition, with a stem cut not just from one of the many Bakelite-adjacent materials that have been made over the years, but genuine, antique Bakelite, recycled from the trinkets of decades past.

Details:

Length: 5.6″ /142.24mm

Bowl Width: 0.81 / 20.57mm

Bowl Depth: 1.26″ / 32.00mm

Weight: 2.0oz / 57g