W

elcome to another episode of All Pipes Considered. Today I'm joined by Sykes Wilford, and we're going to talk about something really cool, and that is Peterson's St. Patrick's Day 2024 pipes.

[Andrew Wike]: Sykes, this is a little bit different than some of the other additions that we've done in recent memory. Can you talk to us a little bit about the inspiration for this year's edition, and maybe what we're looking at here?

[Sykes Wilford]: Well, so first of all, St. Patrick's Day for us at Peterson is an opportunity to experiment and play with colors, materials, and general pipe-making ideas that are a little outside of the classic Peterson range.

[AW]: Right.

[SW]: So we really prize Peterson's historicity, and we lean on that vocabulary a lot. But we also think that St. Patrick's Day is a fun holiday, and we can have a bit of fun with it.

[AW]: Yeah.

[SW]: And maybe color outside the lines just a tiny bit.

[AW]: Sure.

[SW]: But in a good way, hopefully.

[AW]: Yeah.

[SW]: So we have for years thought about how we could do a Standard System mount in a material that wasn't metal.

[AW]: Okay.

[SW]: We do silver all the time, we can do nickel all the time. We are capable of and occasionally do gold for mounts not dissimilar from these. But we wanted to expand what we could do, and we tried a couple of other metals, and then we tried some acrylics to see if we could replicate another material, basically with other colors, with what we were doing in nickel. And this is what we have then. So ultimately, because acrylic is not a metal, and doesn't have the material characteristics of a metal, it's sort of a thin sleeve that sits over the end of the shank instead of sitting on top of the shank like it would for a nickel mount, or a silver mount. So we're turning down the end of the shank differently for these, and then applying these in a stepped process so that they adhere well to the shank.

[AW]: Fascinating. Okay, yeah. Green acrylic military mounts and we've got a whole bunch of different System shapes with lots of different finishes. Can we talk about the mount a little bit more though?

[SW]: Sure. I mean, it's functionally identical to the System Standard on the inside.

[AW]: Right. Yeah, okay.

[SW]: So if you think about what we had to do in order to accommodate it, it was all on the outside of the end of the shank, not the inside of the end of the shank. So on the inside, it is exactly like a Standard System. On the outside, there's a little bit of a different turning in order to accommodate the acrylic mount.

[AW]: Okay. Yeah, yeah. Very interesting. Functionally, then, it performs exactly like you would expect from a military mount?

[SW]: It is no different.

[AW]: No different. So all of the advantages that we could expect from a nickel or a silver military mount, we can still expect from these acrylic mounts, right?

[SW]: Absolutely. So it's providing exactly the same function as a silver or as a metal mount. So in both cases, the stem sits against the wood in a conical fit. And that is no different here. Then that wood is supported by either the metal, or, in this case, the acrylic ring, in exactly the same way that you would expect from a classic System Standard.

[AW]: Sure. Yeah. That's so cool. What an interesting way to take this idea of the System pipe, with over 120 years of history, and do something so completely different while maintaining the essence of it. Right? That's such a unique thing to do. I think they look really cool, too. I think color palette wise, we've done a really good job of matching that green to all the different canonical Peterson palettes here. We've got the really dark, very craggy sandblast, which we've been doing a lot with in recent years. We've got the two-tone, Peterson rustication, we've got Heritage, and we've also got Ebony.

[SW]: This is the first time I think that Ebony has ever appeared in St. Patrick's Day.

[AW]: Really?

[SW]: Yeah.

[AW]: Wow. Okay, that's really cool. The black on green theme is also really cool.

[SW]: I kind of dig it.

[AW]: It's really cool.

[SW]: I also really like it in the sandblast.

[AW]: I do too. I do too.

[SW]: It's like super slick.

[AW]: Yeah. There's something about it that's really felt, you know what I mean? The black P-Lip and the black stain itself with the army mount of green — there's something about it that really resonates.

[SW]: It's so classic, right?

[AW]: Yeah.

[SW]: You've got this black pipe and you put a metal mount on this. The result is an incredibly classic, sophisticated looking pipe. You replace that with a green mount, and it's suddenly playful and fun.

[AW]: For sure. I think it ties back to what you said in the beginning: St. Patrick's Day is an opportunity for Peterson to figure out new, innovative, creative, and playful ways of doing interesting things.

[SW]: There's also a little bit of a tradition if you look at it sideways, a little bit that undergirds this. So there was a series with ebonite military mounts.

[AW]: Oh, right.

[SW]: I don't know, in the '50s or '60s. I don't remember exactly now. So it wasn't a System. But there is a little bit of Peterson's historical precedence for this. If you take that historical precedent, and you combine it with the System, and then you make it green ...

[AW]: Yeah, that's great.

[SW]: But we did play.

[AW]: Yeah. And I think the results are really great. And also, like we have the return of the Donegal tweed sleeves as well.

[SW]: So the Donegal tweed sleeves come with these three finishes, the Smooth, the Ebony and the Sandblast and these are also numbered as a limited edition out of 1,600. The whole run was about 4,000 pipes but we made exactly 1,600 among these three finishes.

[AW]: Very cool, and I think all of them have P-Lip stems. So we've got all of Charles Peterson's patented innovations here: P-Lip stem, moisture reservoir, System drilling, army mount, each in a lot of different finishes, with all the different System shapes, and green acrylic military mounts. Man, those are so cool.

[SW]: It was a little engineering exercise. Well, engineering might be too grand a word. But the mechanical and engineering in the factory exercise was how do we preserve all of those things, and then use a completely different material than had been used in the System pipes previously?

[AW]: That's fascinating. So all these are available on the site right now. I hope that you guys enjoy them as much as we have. I think that they're really interesting. I think they're very innovative. And it's really cool to see Peterson look at its tradition and also figure out a way of pushing that envelope forward. So once again, Sykes, thank you so much for joining me, and talking about these today.

[SW]: Thank you so much, Andy.

[AW]: We hope you guys enjoy them.

[SW]: Thanks, everyone.