Kurt Huhn (Pipecrafter): A Bench Craftsman from Rhode Island

Kurt Huhn is a pipe maker who works out of a small workshop in Clayville, Rhode Island, and signs his pieces under the name Pipecrafter. According to available records he took up the bench semi-professionally in 2003, keeping his work at a semi-professional scale rather than turning it into a factory line. His name became known in the internet-based American pipe community of the 2000s both for the pipes he made and for how openly he documented his craft.

Workshop and Method

Huhn's pipes are finished one at a time by hand, which places him within the definition of an artisan pipe maker. Rather than buying ready-made mouthpiece blanks, he cuts his mouthpieces by hand from ebonite rod, a choice that lets the mouthpiece be shaped to match the stem angle and the smoking channel, and is a familiar stance on the craftsman's side of the mouthpiece materials debate.

A technical detail that stands out in his bench notes concerns the order of operations. In common practice the block is drilled first and the body is shaped around those holes; Huhn, on at least one piece, finished the body completely before drilling the holes. This order gives the maker freedom in gathering the grain in the briar along the desired line, but because it requires the channels to meet flawlessly in an already-finished body, it leaves little room for error and calls for specialized drill bits. Where the material comes from is also among his interests; this discussion is gathered on PipoWiki under the heading briar block sourcing.

Ties to the Community

Huhn's recognition is intertwined with two internet venues of his era. One was the alt.smokers.pipes (A.S.P. for short) discussion group founded on USENET. Each year the group chose a "shape of the year" by member vote, and participating makers were free to interpret that shape however they liked. In 2007 the chosen shape was the poker; the pipe Huhn made for this project had a flattened base, with the flat surface extended somewhat toward the shank.

The second venue was the journal he updated for years. In its entries he listed the dimensions of individual pipes, the shade of stain applied, and the hiccups that came up during making. Such open production notes are a primary source for anyone wanting to trace the American bench culture of the 2000s.

Series and Afterward

One of the pieces Huhn named was the "Mount Doom" line, designed to sit on a table. Because desktop pipes are meant to stand under their own weight rather than be carried by hand, body proportion and balance calculations set this kind of work apart from ordinary pipes.

The Pipecrafter signature is the product of a narrow window stretching from the mid to late 2000s; his journal entries also thin out toward 2009. In the same years Huhn also took an interest in furniture and knife making. This habit of publicly documenting his own bench, his method, and his mistakes is counted among the defining traits of that generation's small-scale American makers.