Today we were lucky enough to have pipe maker Alex Florov and his wife Vera visit with us over here at the Smokingpipes.com campus. After a thorough tour and a fine lunch, we got to sit down and pick the man's brain.
Each Florov pipe usually begins with a sketch, which Alex finds himself doing constantly at work, on napkins, or any other time an idea pops into his head for a shape or engineering detail. Primarily using a milling machine to drill precision holes in excellent briar, Alex is one of the few artisans in the world who carves most of the pipe with razor-sharp hand chisels. By working with such hand tools, Alex is able to create very detailed edges and concaved areas on a pipe that a sanding disk would not allow. His pipes are each graced with hand-cut vulcanite stems that have hand-turned vulcanite tenons and are either sandblasted or smooth (the Slonim being his highest grade). Some accents favored by Alex include bamboo, boxwood, horn, and any other material the pipe maker falls in love with.