Sandblasted Bent Dublin with Fordite (320) Tobacco Pipe

A fittingly far more structured design than the Tipsy Dublin appearing in this same Shalosky batch, here in the form of a sitter Dublin with a squared and arching shank we find one of Bill's "fordite" accented pieces. What is fordite? It's an artifact of American industry; more specifically it's many, many layers of paint that bonded together as the overspray that resulted from older automotive body painting techniques. Workers at the factories would eventually have to chip this colorful, many-layered build-up off equipment used for that part of the line, and some of them, apparently took to collecting the stuff. As medium for art or craft it's remained fairly obscure, and as far as I know Bill was the first to ever use it as an accent on pipes.

- Eric N. Squires