Silver Gray: Partially Sandblasted Skater with NAP Stem Tobacco Pipe

Silver Gray is an American pipe artisan who learned the craft working closely with Brad Pohlmann and continues to further develop her own unique style with bespoke renditions such as this crisply-defined Skater. The Skater is not a common shape, although it does have a place on classic shape charts, and is defined by the pronounced, pointy heel, rendered with extra prominence in this example. Silver has made the design her own, pinching the tall, cylindrical bowl a bit in the center for a sinuous note and placing smooth facets on the concave underside. The arrow-straight shank displays ridgelines on the top and bottom, creating an elliptical cross section that amplifies the pipe's sleek shaping.

Fit and finish are superb here, as should be expected of Silver's work, with the bowl shaped perfectly to accentuate stunning flame grain under a smooth, smoky contrast finish, and the shank's sides dressed in dark ruby-hued sandblast. The svelte handcrafted saddle stem is made of brindled vulcanite, the pink and black striations unifying well with the sandblasted flanks of the shank, and is further elevated by Gray's special rendition of a NAP lip button.

One of Charles Peterson's most iconic patents was for the P-Lip design in 1898, still used today across Peterson's portfolio, but what many don't know is that he also patented another mouthpiece design six years later: the NAP stem, which appeared in Peterson's 1906 catalog only to fade into obscurity and eventual discontinuance in 1928. An almost forgotten innovation, the NAP stem featured a unique button that distributes smoke across the palate via five individual slots from the airway and a "clamshell" design with vents at each side and a horizontal gap at the front. Such engineering won't allow the stem to pass a pipe cleaner, but the idea behind the NAP stem is that, unlike the P-Lip which orients smoke upward across the roof of the mouth, smoke is distributed evenly across the palate. Silver has been fashioning NAP stems by hand since 2019, revitalizing the design, and detailed accounts of her process and of the results can be find at Mark Irwin's renowned Peterson Pipe Notes blog. Cutting such a stem requires time-consuming process and much hands-on work, and it's inclusion on this already unique Skater makes for a truly collectible piece.