JS Pipes (Joel Shapiro)

JS Pipes is the name of the small-scale handmade briar pipe bench run by American pipemaker Joel Shapiro in Rancho Cordova, California. The records do not state when the bench was founded; the period in which its name was heard was the 2000s. In these years Shapiro finished a small number of pipes and announced them without a middleman, through his own website. The bench is not active today, though exactly when activity ended is not known.

Approach to Making

The most-cited aspect of the bench is that it did not resort to fills for imperfections. Cracks or sand pits that appeared in the briar stummel were not masked with putty; the pipe was delivered along with the wood's own flaws. This preference is known both from surviving examples and from the maker's own promotional text. Staining was done with alcohol-based dyes, finished with only a thin coat of carnauba wax; the maker argued this method did not close the wood's pores and therefore did not affect the smoke. Where the briar came from (Greece, Italy, etc.), the mouthpiece material, and any shank extension were separately recorded for each pipe. Vulcanite, lucite, and cumberland are seen in the mouthpieces.