Ted Bihlmaier (TAB Pipes)

Ted Bihlmaier is an American bench maker who signs his pipes with the "TAB" stamp derived from his initials. He came to the craft later in life. By his own account, the start was a matter of chance: in 2008 his father sent him a pipe collection he could no longer use, and the following year he went to the pipe show in Chicago to understand what these pipes he now had were.

This step, born of curiosity, turned within a few years into a bench with regular output. The source of this account is the maker himself; there is no way to cross-check it against an independent record.

Apprenticeship and First Pipes

The person he met at the show was Latvian-born maker Maigurs Knets. Knets's living roughly twenty minutes away, on the Wisconsin side of the state line, made things easier; Bihlmaier learned every stage of pipe making from him over repeated visits. Because the sources give the two makers' locations no more precisely than this relative description, the state Bihlmaier's bench is tied to is not known for certain. This route from master to apprentice is a common one in the American handmade pipe scene.

The start came through making pipe tampers rather than pipes. As small-scale turning and finishing jobs got his hand into practice, the turn came to the bowl, and the maker, by his own account, put forward his first pipes he judged worth selling in 2010. Again by his own account, he retired in 2020 after more than thirty years in law enforcement, and the time he devotes to the bench has grown since then; production thus shifted from a spare-time pursuit to his main occupation. None of these dates has been confirmed by any official record.