DeJarnett Pipes

DeJarnett Pipes is the name of a small workshop based in Glendale, in the U.S. state of Arizona, just northwest of Phoenix. Horace Edgar DeJarnett, who shaped his pipes one at a time by hand, is among the craftsmen who took up the trade late in life; after a business career spanning more than forty years, he came to the bench and devoted roughly the last fifteen years of his life to carving briar.

The Maker's Path

According to his obituary, DeJarnett was born on August 19, 1935, in the town of Kerens, Texas. He spent nearly the whole of his working life in the food trade, turning the wholesale brokerage company he founded in 1984 into a business spanning several states, and stepping back from it in 1999 by selling his stake. His turn toward pipes dates earlier, to 1993, the year he quit smoking cigarettes. With retirement, this interest turned into a craft; he spent an apprenticeship period totaling roughly a year, spread over several stints, alongside Andrew Kovacs, a maker known in northern Arizona as "Jandrew." By his own account he also owes part of what he learned to advice given remotely by American maker Mark Tinsky. A serious health problem he experienced in 2001 did not change his routine at the bench, and production continued in the years that followed.

Approach to Making

By the maker's own statement, his blocks were selected from Algerian briar. What made the brand a topic of conversation within the community, though, comes down to two technical choices.

The first is the diameter of the smoke channel. DeJarnett said he found the 5/32-inch bore that was considered the factory standard of the day too narrow, and so drilled his own pipes to 3/16 inch. Channel diameter is set at the lathe-drilling stage and directly affects a pipe's draw character; whether it should be narrow or wide remains an ongoing debate within the American artisan generation.

The second choice is the pre-applied carbon coating the workshop put on the inner surface of the bowl. The aim of this coating is to make a bowl that has not yet built its own cake behave more steadily during its first smokes; it is a method many makers turn to in order to shorten the breaking-in period of a new pipe.

Stamps and Distribution

The single detailed account resting on repair records reports that the stamp consists of the wording De Jarnett, with the letter "J" drawn in the shape of a pipe, together with a cactus figure; the same source notes that the wording "Handmade in Arizona" and a production number can be found under the shank. There is no independent tally of total output; by the maker's own statement, around a thousand pipes were made over the years, most of which stayed in the United States, though they also reached enthusiasts in Germany, England, Japan, Canada, Israel, Indonesia and Thailand.

Horace DeJarnett died on July 24, 2013. With his death the workshop closed, and the brand, sharing the common fate of one-man workshops, is now represented only by the existing pipes that continue to circulate. In terms of timing and scale, he can be placed in the same generation as American craftsmen who became known in the years the internet spread widely, such as Kurt Huhn.