Being a sandblast, this piece required a smooth patch somewhere for the stamping, and displaying his usual attention to every detail Maigurs didn't settle for a simple rectangle or circle, but instead created two paired, naturalistic leaf-shapes, one for his "MKNETTS USA" maker's mark, the other for the pipe's production number. The manner in which Maigurs treats even something so mundane as the stamping says a lot about his approach to pipemaking. Like his mentor Alex Florov, Maigurs does much of his shaping with specialized modeling chisels, a technique which, along with an incredible amount of skill and no little natural talent, allows for the creation of such amazing elegant and finely-defined designs like this Kangaroo - those subtle hollows and complex, perfectly refined flow of one line into another are not going to come off of a sanding disc.
- Eric N. Squires
