Weiner (Steve Weiner)

Weiner is the name Steve Weiner (d. 2002), an American briar craftsman, stamped on his pipes. Pipemaking wasn't actually Weiner's profession: he lived in Olmsted Falls, a suburb of Cleveland, ran his own bill-auditing company, and made his pipes on a workbench in his basement during the hours left over from work. Even so, this part-time output became one of the most talked-about names on the American handmade pipe scene during the 1990s.

Material and Workbench

Weiner's unwavering preference was plateau briar — the part of the root close to the outer surface that keeps its natural bark texture. He cut his mouthpieces from Italian lucite (acrylic), made the distinctive dot he placed above the mouthpiece from briar, and moved between briar and lucite for his inlays as well. All shaping, from rough carving to final polish, was done by hand: sanding disc, file, and sandpaper. The only job he left to a machine was turning the tenon; he spun it on a small lathe and finished the fit by hand. He brought his smooth-surfaced examples up through fine sandpaper before staining and waxing them.

He never invested in sandblasting equipment, for reasons of both space and cost. Because he chose to carve a pipe whenever a block didn't lend itself to a smooth surface, roughly four-fifths of his output stayed rustic-finished. Nor did he push his shape repertoire; his work turns around standard shapes and their close variants. How many pipes he produced depended entirely on the time left over from his job, and by the mid-1990s his yearly average exceeded a hundred.