Keresaspa: Difference between revisions

   

In 2015, he decided to start seriously researching the craft of pipemaking, and to collect the materials needed to experiment with pipemaking for himself. Over the course of the year, he gathered the materials he needed, and found a workshop that would rent him a lathe to use for a few hours a week. In 2016, he made his first pipe.

Keresaspa’s education in pipemaking came from reading as many articles on the subject as he could find, from magazines, books, and pipemaking forums on the internet. He also studied interviews with pipemakers and videos that showed these artisans and factory carvers demonstrating how pipes are made. Using this information, he experimented with making his first pipes, concentrating first on their functional properties. These pipes were made for his own use, meaning Keresaspa was able to create several stems for the same stummel, making minor adjustments to the diameter of the draught hole or the funneling of the airway, before testing out how they affected the smoking qualities of the overall pipe. Keresaspa would also sometimes experiment with drilling and re-drilling the draught holes of his stummels, combining them with his variously measured stems, in order to discover the ideal combination of the two. To this day, Keresaspa considers the stem to be the most important part of the pipe, meaning he will spend several days only doing stem work until he is satisfied with the outcome.

In terms of influences, Keresaspa remains fascinated by the precise engineering behind the ‘perfect smoker.’ Due to this, a major influence upon Keresaspa’s pipes are the experiments he has undertaken in order to fine-tune the smoking characteristics of a pipe. In addition to this, Keresaspa asks his customers who own high-end artisan pipes to send him lists of their measurements, so that he has more variables to test out for himself. Keresaspa is also a great admirer of the aesthetic styles of many of the masters of Scandinavian and Japanese pipemaking, citing [[Ivarsson, Sixten|Sixten]] and [[Ivarsson, Lars|Lars Ivarsson]], [[Nordh|Bo Nordh]], [[Jørn Micke]], [[Poul Ilsted Bech|Poul Ilsted]], [[Chonowitsch, Jess|Jess Chonowitsch]], [[Gotoh|Kei ‘Ichi Gotoh]], and [[Tokutomi, Hiroyuki|Hiroyuki Tokutomi]] as inspirations. However, Keresaspa also remains fond of classical English-French shapes, especially the functionalist simplicity of the humble billiard.

Other sources of inspiration for Keresaspa include a variety of man-made and natural objects, including architecture, as might be expected. One example has been Achaemenid columns, known in the Western world as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_column Persian or Persepolitan columns], which inspired Kersaspa in the shaping and flaring of some of his pipe stems.