Stanwell Reg Era Hand Made 48 Smooth Acorn Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

Stanwell is one of Denmark’s most celebrated and enduring pipe companies, having been founded by Poul Nielsen shortly after the second world war. Over the last six decades, Stanwell has established itself as both a leader in innovative Danish design and for producing well-priced pipes with precision construction and engineering. Many of its designs were created for the company by iconic pipe-makers in the Scandinavian scene, such as Sixten Ivarsson, Anne Julie, Jess Chonowitsch, and Tom Eltang.

I’ve always found the shape 48 to be an odd one within Stanwell’s catalog, but not for the reason you might expect. The shape was designed at the end of the 1950s by Sixten Ivarsson, and was, it seems, so well received by Poul Nielsen and his colleagues that three shape 48s were commissioned: the original 48, the demiwarden shape 48 H, and the churchwarden shape 48 L. At the time, the only other shape that received this special treatment was the shape 30, aka Ivarsson’s Peewit.

By the mid-1970s, all three shape 48s had disappeared from Stanwell’s catalogs, though one could argue that the shape lived on in a rather curious way. You see, the shape 30 remained in Stanwell catalogs for for many years after the 48 was discontinued, but it wasn’t quite the same as the original. At the beginning of the 1980s, the 30 was made much more squat and acorn-like, almost as if the original 30 and the 48 had been cross-bred. Perhaps Stanwell should have averaged them out and given the new 30 the “39” shape code (after all, Stanwell often reused shape codes for different designs, and the older 39 was long gone by then). In any case, this one will have been made between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s, and is an example of the high-end Hand Made line.

This pipe is completely unsmoked, with an original bowl coating. Some minor handling marks.

 

Details:

Length: 6.3″ / 160.0mm

Bowl Width: 0.76 / 19.30mm

Bowl Depth: 1.37″ / 34.79mm

Weight: 1.0oz / 30g