Hydrostone and Resin Pipes

Hydrostone and resin pipes describes pipes produced by mold-casting, standing outside the carved tradition of briar and meerschaum. What ties the two materials together is a shared production logic: a mold reproduces every detail of a fine carving as many times as wanted, without further labor. This convenience produced two very different outcomes in pipe making. Plaster-based hydrostone remained an openly declared copying and repair material; resin, meanwhile, became both the raw material of cheap mass-produced bowls and the chief tool of forgery in the collector market.

Hydrostone: A Copy in Plaster

Hydrostone is the trade name of a high-strength plaster used in American casting and model-making industries. The chemical basis of the plaster is calcium sulfate hemihydrate; it begins to set about ten minutes after being mixed with water, completes its initial hardening within an hour, and continues to gain strength over the following days as its internal crystal structure changes. Because it sets into a white, tight-grained, lightweight mass, it's favored for sculpture, figurines, and mold work. These same qualities also make it well suited to imitating meerschaum's matte white surface.

The period this material is associated with pipes is the early 1970s. Records show that Michael Seiden, who bought and sold antique meerschaum pipes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, advertised hydrostone castings of pipes and cigar holders from his own collection in Hobbies magazine in the fall of 1971. These pieces were sold as copies, not fakes, and weren't intended to be smoked either. That's also what made the experiment short-lived: plaster isn't a bowl material that can stand up to fire. It does, however, still come to mind as a filler in repairing a cracked meerschaum bowl.

Resin Enters Pipe Making

Resin is a solid or very thick substance, of plant or synthetic origin, capable of being turned into a polymer. It entered pipe making first through the mouthpiece; the early 20th century's gutta-percha and Redmanol examples are where early phenolic resins were first tried. In the bowl, the best-known formulation is Brylon: S. M. Frank & Co. developed this material in 1966, combining resin with wood flour to give a cheap alternative to briar, and began producing part of its Medico and Yello-Bole lines from it. Both brands still carry Brylon models today. Among smokers, Brylon is known for its low cost and resistance to breakage; it's also criticized for being heavy and smoking hot. Another trial of the same period is the "the pipe" line, produced starting in 1963 by the Super-Temp company, its bowl interior lined with pyrolytic graphite; marketed under the name Venturi after 1965, this line went out of production in the mid-1970s. A comparison of these materials is covered in the article on pipe bowl materials.

Where Copy Ends and Fake Begins

Imitation meerschaum is not a 20th-century invention. In 19th-century English humor writing, reading the word "meerschaum" as "mere sham" was a wordplay that circulated for a time; in the same years, chips of the genuine stone were kneaded with clay into a paste and sold as "artificial meerschaum." Cast resin added a new possibility to this line, because a body coming out of a mold could be marketed as a carved antique. The example the community knows best is a pipe bearing a misspelled "Gustav Fisher Jnr" signature on the bowl and a reference to the 1873 Vienna exhibition on the body. That it was produced from the same mold in large numbers is evident from the piece's repeated reappearance at auctions and online marketplaces; its manufacturer is unknown. It's also reported that resin copies made by an English dealer in the early 2000s, cast from molds taken off his own antique meerschaums, have circulated at auction.

Notes on Telling Them Apart

The signs that give away a cast body generally appear together: a bowl stained dark red from day one to hide the mold seam, crude and detail-poor carving, walls of uniform thickness throughout, a plastic mouthpiece instead of amber, and a cast zinc-alloy band instead of silver. There are also two old criteria the community has repeated for about a century. The first is rubbing the surface with silver: a synthetic body leaves a mark resembling a pencil line, while genuine stone doesn't. The second is color change; imitation material doesn't turn honey-colored with smoking. The problem also isn't confined to a single material: on the briar side, the fake Dunhills of the 1980s describe a similar episode.