Svenska Rökpipfabriken

Svenska Rökpipfabriken is a family business founded in 1931 in Lerum, near Gothenburg, regarded as Sweden's first briar pipe factory. Its name means "Swedish Pipe Factory" and it appears mostly under the abbreviation SRF on products and in trade records. For a long stretch after its founding it is also cited as the country's only briar pipe factory. Since the rest of Swedish pipemaking relied largely on small workshops and one-man signatures such as Björn of Sweden, SRF represents almost the entirety of the country's mass production.

The Eliason Family and Scale

The factory was founded by father and son Hjalmar and Gösta Eliason. Hjalmar had a long background in the tobacco industry behind him; according to records he had served as general manager of Ystads Nya Tobaksfabrik and Tobaksfabrik AB Göta. Gösta, after training in woodworking, learned pipemaking by working for a year at a factory in the Swiss village of Kleinlützel. The division of labor was clear from the start: Gösta ran production, while Hjalmar handled wholesaler and dealer relations until his retirement in the early 1940s.

The scale never grew large. The business opened with the founding pair and two employees; in later years the staff fluctuated between four and fifteen. Although it carried the name "factory," this made SRF closer in size to a sizeable workshop than to French or English mass producers.

Customers and Model Range

SRF produced both under its own brand and to order; the design of the in-house branded pipes belonged to Gösta. Major buyers such as Pibe Dan in Copenhagen and Sanden, Broberg and Pipcenter in Gothenburg had models made exclusively for them. One-off pipes made to individual customers' own drawings were also part of the workshop's regular business; a series of one-off models designed by industrial designer Prince Sigvard Bernadotte was produced here as well. In its later period, with five employees, it is stated that between 7,200 and 8,400 pipes were made per year, and total production is put at around one million pipes. Records show Fix, Rex and Redo as brand names produced by SRF.

Materials, Process and Finishes

The factory sourced its briar in the early years mainly from Algeria and Corsica, and in later periods largely from Spain; the blocks arrived by ship in jute sacks at the port of Gothenburg. When briar became hard to find during the Second World War, pear wood was used instead; the limitation commonly seen with non-briar woods showed up here too, since pear could not withstand heat as well as briar.

Although completing a pipe varied by model, it was broken into thirty-two separate process steps: the process began on the lathe, continued with milling, then went through eleven stages of grinding and polishing. The first lathe Gösta brought from Switzerland was hand-cranked; later ones were made by local blacksmiths. Before shipping, pipes got their "first smoke" from a suction machine: the chamber wall was coated with a mixture of sugar, tobacco ash and tobacco, then filled and smoked by the machine.

The surface finish was chosen according to the quality of the wood. Clean blocks were simply wax-polished, while flawed ones received more staining and texturing; the colors used were brown, burgundy and black. The main finishes were named Hunter, describing a wax-polished smooth surface; Rex, in which small voids were filled with putty; Shell, opened up with a rotating steel brush; and Rustic, its straight or wavy lines drawn by hand with a special steel tool.

The Repair Branch and Closure

Repair eventually became a business in its own right: pipes were collected from shops in Lerum and Gothenburg or arrived by mail, logged on Mondays, worked on through the week, and delivered back to their owners by Friday. By 1977 the monthly repair count is reported to have reached around a thousand. In 1946 the factory also published a small booklet on pipe care, advising against smoking one pipe after another and recommending letting a pipe cool between smokes.

Production ended in 1979 when Gösta Eliason and the staff retired. Some records say the business was sold that year and the closure came a few years later. Some of the machinery was sold to craftsmen, but neither the brand nor the accumulated production know-how was passed on to a next generation.