Stanwell Reg Era Hand Made Smooth Poker Estate Briar Pipe, Danish Estates

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.

The poker is a shape that is surprisingly uncommon within Stanwell’s portfolio, especially considered as a whole. Though the company started out with a view to making classically “English” pipes, it is hard to find a poker or cherrywood rendition in surviving catalogs from Stanwell’s first decades, and it is only relatively recently that such pipes (specifically, the shape “207” and its Featherweight counterpart, the “245”) have been fixtures in the company’s output. In terms of older Stanwell pokers, aside from the occasional semi-freehand, there is only one shape that comes to mind, at least when it comes to the poker’s traditional form (I wouldn’t call the “87” a “true poker,” for example). That shape is the “68,” a rather trim and lightweight design that straddles the line between a poker and a cherrywood in much the same way that Anglo-French approaches often do. It is by no means a common shape, and to be honest I’m not sure when it was first introduced, though from the registration number stamped on this one, it will have been prior to the 1980s. This one happens to also be an example of Stanwell’s higher-end Hand Made line from the 1960s and ’70s, showing off particularly good flame grain running around its bowl.

The condition is fair. Some scratches on the rim, chamber slightly over-reamed, slight residual oxidation, and stem slightly over-buffed at the base.

Details:

Length: 5.7″ / 144.7mm

Bowl Width: 0.83 / 18.79mm

Bowl Depth: 1.39″ / 35.30mm

Weight: 1.2oz / 36g