Adam Davidson: Smooth Triple Bamboo Almond Tobacco Pipe

Adam Davidson drew inspiration for this year's piece from his inaugural one five years ago. The shapes are completely different, but Adam wanted to once again utilize nine knuckles of bamboo. He's incorporated said knuckles, though, through three separate sections of bamboo, each composed of three knuckles and stacked on top of each other to comprise the shank. It's a massive feat of craftsmanship, bamboo being more unforgiving than briar — there is no re-shaping of the organic material to account for miscues like briar, and very rarely can one find three bamboo sections whose knuckles vertically align so perfectly as those seen here.

The center section is the only one drilled all the way through, the other two being fitted with metal pins at the end and attached to the briar and vulcanite stabilizer at either end. The resulting, stacked aesthetic makes for a mechanical, Steam Punk-like motif — the bamboo seeming like the mechanical inner-workings or "bone structure" of the shank, the briar flesh having been carved away to reveal the skeletal form underneath. The stacked nature of the bamboo and parallelism of the implied vertical lines through the knuckles also lends the piece a hard-lined, geometric, Art Deco-like motif that leads the eye into the tall, Almond bowl up front.

One of Davidson's signature shapes (alongside the Fig, Amoeba, and Lorraine designs), the Almond is defined by an Acorn-eque bowl, pinched at the flanks to form a ridgeline down the fore and aft. Such a compressed bowl pairs well with the pinched nature of the three bamboo sections, and it's been finished naturally. Adam opting for a simple oil coating to accentuate the gorgeous cross cut pattern. He also imbued it with a slightly smaller chamber (compared to the bowl size), ensuring that the slender bamboo doesn't take on too much heat and moisture during the smoke. Highly creative and impressive work from Adam, combining one of his recognizable shapes with an innovative, never-before-seen bamboo orientation.