Doctor’s Pipes Grand Flash Smooth Rhodesian w/ Boxwood Handmade Briar Pipe, New

Description

Doctor’s Pipes are made by artisan pipe-maker Roman Kovalev. Based in Saint Petersburg, Kovalev’s pipe-making moniker derives from his sixteen years spent as a pediatric neurologist, and the consequent nickname of ‘Doc’ given by his friends. Taking up pipe-making in the early 2010s, and with a great deal of inspiration from Japanese masters such as Hiroyuki Tokutomi, Kovalev’s career underwent a meteoric rise that most artisans can only dream of. As one might expect from their maker’s background, Doctor’s Pipes are truly precision instruments; they are also highly inventive, however, with one of Kovalev’s innovations being the sandblasting machine that he designed and built as tailored to his own personal specifications.

It is a rare talent to be able to take something that is common and conventional and make it novel and unique. And it is rarer still to be able to reinvent something in this manner and to do it well. In the pipe world, that something is typically a shape; the Rhodesian, for example, is a shape that has been widely adopted in pipe making for 150 years, if not more (by the way, keep your eyes peeled for a 19th century Rhodesian we’ll be listing in the next few days). It is not a simple shape, nor is it easy to turn, but it has been around for longer than jackets and pants have had zippers. Yet here we have a Rhodesian from Roman Kovalev that is beyond semblance or comparison with any rendition that isn’t Kovalev’s own. Its bowl is built like a home, with a palpable sturdiness and a sense of being much taller than it actually is; its shank, composed almost entirely of bamboo, has been given the kind of drastic curvature normally reserved for early French briars bored with flexible drills. And then there are the little details, such as the ridge-line running underneath the bowl that softens the transition from the bamboo’s wild asymmetry to the bowl’s geometric precision. It is a beautiful pipe, and certainly possesses superior grain quality to 99% of the already-excellent pipes being made today (with a perfect transition from straight grain to bird’s-eye at the bowl’s bead-line, no less), but focusing on standard modes of evaluation might well be missing a much bigger picture on a pipe like this one.

Details:

Length: 4.2″ / 106.6mm

Bowl Width: 0.86 / 21.84mm

Bowl Depth: 1.57″ / 39.87mm

Weight: 1.5oz / 44g