Pipas de Cochera

Pipas de Cochera is the name Mexican engineer Roberto González González gave to the pipes he made himself; in Spanish it means "garage pipes." There is no brand or workshop behind it: the name describes an amateur pursuit that became visible on a personal website in the early 2000s. What keeps pipe circles talking about it today is not the pipes themselves but the making notes published on that page. Written at a time when Spanish-language pipe-making sources were almost nonexistent in Latin America, these notes came to be regarded as a first-hand reference for enthusiasts in the region.

What is known about González's life comes from his own account; there is no independent record. According to it, he was born in 1957 in Mexico City, studied electronics engineering, and pursued his career first in Ciudad Juárez, then in Guadalajara's electronics industry. He came to pipes in adulthood, after a long period of cigarette smoking; as his collection grew, his interest shifted from smoking to making.

Starting from a Kit

The starting point of the pursuit was a ready-made pipe kit. In these kits sold by makers such as American Smoking Pipe Co., a briar block comes pre-drilled so the bowl, the airway, and the tenon socket already line up, along with a matching stem blank; what is left to the buyer is to shape and sand. According to the company's own promotion, the kits offer ebauchon or plateaux briar; plateaux blocks are distinguished by their retained bark surface and cleaner grain. The first sets González acquired were plateaux.

By his own account, his workshop began with a single tool, a hand-held rotary tool, then grew as needs arose: a drill press and tenon-turning tooling so he could bore the holes himself, a disc and belt sander to replace hand sanding, and a small lathe for stem work. Once the tooling was complete, he says he stopped using ready-made kits and moved to building directly from the block. This progression is a common sequence among those who enter pipe making as amateurs.

Stem Work

The subject the notes devote the most space to is the stem. González writes that he kept using ready-made, molded blanks for a while, but that the blank did not hold its original shape — he often re-turned it on the lathe and sometimes changed the whole form. In notes carried in Círculo de la Pipa México publications, he instead advocates working vulcanite rod and making the stem from scratch; the reasons he gives are freedom of shape, a more homogeneous material, and a longer life. It is a widely held view among pipe makers that vulcanite produced under high pressure in rod form does not contain the air pockets that can appear during sanding on molded stems and spoil the work. The cost is labor: hand-turning a stem, it is said, takes nearly as long as finishing a pipe from start to finish. Among stem materials, vulcanite is preferred because it feels soft against the teeth.

Mexico's Pipe Community

The Pipas de Cochera page coincides with the period when an organized pipe community was taking shape in Mexico. Records say the Círculo de la Pipa México was founded in Mexico City in 2000, registered a few years later with the International Committee of Pipe Clubs (CIPC), and ceased activity in 2015. What González wrote circulated within this community, and after his original site closed, it was preserved through club publications and other sites that carried it forward. Whether he continues the pursuit is not known.