Urup (Arne Urup)

Urup is a pipe signature bearing the name of Danish master Arne Urup, built almost entirely around meerschaum. The master is said to have begun working with this material in the early 1970s, with a block that came into his hands.

Although he was active in the years when freehand briar was giving the country its name, he stayed outside the formal explorations associated with the Danish School, choosing instead to confine himself to meerschaum, amber, and silver, carrying forward Central Europe's old carving techniques. There is little room for machinery in the workshop; most of the work is done by hand.

Amber Mouthpieces

On Urup's pipes the mouthpiece is mostly genuine amber. The raw material used is stated to be Baltic amber sourced from Lithuania. The master's reason for choosing the cloudy variety known as "milk amber" over transparent amber is practical: this type is available in large, sturdy pieces, and unlike transparent amber, it does not, after a while, reveal the smoke channel visible from inside.

What makes amber a difficult material is its brittleness. The smoke channel cannot be drilled straight through from one end; as the drill nears the exit point, no body remains to hold the piece upright, and the amber cracks. For this reason drilling proceeds from both ends, advancing in steps of a few millimeters to meet in the middle; the master is said to use a flattened bicycle spoke for this task. A thread is cut at the end of the channel facing the shank, into which a Teflon fitting seated in the socket inside the shank is fitted. The fact that a single mouthpiece demands several hours of hand labor stems from these details. Maintenance, however, is simple: amber cannot tolerate chemical cleaners, so soap and water suffice.