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"The best decision I ever made was to become a pipe maker," says Tom Eltang as he sands a billiard that will soon make its way to South Carolina to Smokingpipes.com. I'm sitting in Tom Eltang's workshop as I write and we've discussed everything from the political situation in Botswana to manufacturing in China, but the conversation, as it always does when I'm with Tom, returned to pipes. Tom Eltang is now one of the most successful pipe makers in the world today. But it has been a long road.
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| A Tom Eltang pipe also stamped 'Pipe Dan' |
Tom first went to work with Anne Julie in 1974. She had taken over the operation when her husband, Poul Rasmussen, died in 1968, and continued to run it as a small operation for the following few years. Tom, who had wanted to make pipes since he was a little boy, had a three year agreement for an apprenticeship with Anne, but at the very end, a position opened at the famous Pipe Dan shop as a pipe repairer. At the time, Pipe Dan had a full time craftsman repairing fifty or more pipes a day. When the repairman died suddenly, they were scrambling to replace him. P. E. Hermann, a briar and pipe making supplies importer, connected Tom with the Pipe Dan folks and Tom became the new repairman for Pipe Dan. The repair work proved to be not quite a full time job for the young Tom Eltang and he also made pipes at pipe Dan, making perhaps two hundred during his three year tenure there.
In 1980, Tom set out on his own, moving into a new workshop he shared with cabinetmakers, and continued to make pipes for Pipe Dan. Many of those pipes, like most Pipe Dan pipes, bore both Tom's name and the shop name. During this period, Tom also made pipes for a German importer under his own name.
Stanwell, the largest and most famous of the pipe factories in Denmark, had long maintained a pipe maker on the road visiting shops in Germany and Switzerland to demonstrate pipe making. In 1982, the craftsman who made these trips for Stanwell died and again P. E. Hermann, having heard this, mentioned the opening to Tom. Tom jumped at the opportunity and found himself on the road in his little VW Polo with pipe making equipment, visiting shops at least six weeks a year in three trips. Tom and a representative from Stanwell would visit the shops for three days at a time, finishing half-made pipes in front of throngs of pipe enthusiasts. The pace was grueling, with extremely long days and constant travel. This continued for four years, until the birth of his second daughter, Sara, while he was on the road in Germany. At that point, he decided he was done with the German pipe tours.
Tom's relationship with Stanwell continued, with Tom finishing the Stanwell Golden Contrast series until 1995. Indeed, Tom continues to design shapes for Stanwell to this day. During this whole period, Tom of course continued to make pipes under his own name that were sold to various shops in Denmark and Germany. The Stanwell Golden Contrast series pipes were made from bowls that Tom specifically selected at the factory and then finished the same way he finished his own pipes.
Tom suggests that his iconic Golden Contrast stain was actually first developed by Bjorn Bengtsson, but he's not certain. The stain itself (actually a two part stain that oxidizes on contact) had been used for black dress pipes previously. The insight was to sand the black stain off, creating the contrast between the harder wood that didn't take as much of the black stain and the softer wood that did, thereby highlighting the grain. Regardless of who first came up with the idea of the stain, it has been in Tom's hands that it has become famous.
During the late 1980s and parts of the early 1990s, a difficult period for many pipe makers, Tom had to find work in addition to pipe making. He always continued to make pipes, but other work here and there was necessary to support his young family. Tom says he was always a full time pipe maker and worked a full schedule pipe making, but at the time, this just wasn't enough. As the 1990s progressed and the pipe market improved, Tom Eltang began to receive the recognition that he deserved. He made his first journey to the Chicago Show in 2001 and moved into his present, now rather famous, workshop in 2004.
Tom has made pipes for almost forty years now. It's easy to forget that the extraordinary popularity and success that his pipes now enjoy is relatively recent, really just the past decade. Yet Tom has always felt it was special to be a pipe maker. It's good now with the global reputation he has and far more demand for his pipes than he could ever satisfy, but for Tom it was always good because it was always about the pipes. As Tom says, "It's good to be a pipe maker!"
Tagged in: Behind-The-Scenes Interview Pipe Makers Pipe Making Tom Eltang Travel
Comments
Very interesting article. Have learned about Tom Eltang. Only had seen some of his pipes in Germany