Weiner (Steve Weiner)

Weiner is the name Steve Weiner (d. 2002), an American briar craftsman, stamped on his pipes. Pipemaking wasn't actually Weiner's profession: he lived in Olmsted Falls, a suburb of Cleveland, ran his own bill-auditing company, and made his pipes on a workbench in his basement during the hours left over from work. Even so, this part-time output became one of the most talked-about names on the American handmade pipe scene during the 1990s.

Material and Workbench

Weiner's unwavering preference was plateau briar — the part of the root close to the outer surface that keeps its natural bark texture. He cut his mouthpieces from Italian lucite (acrylic), made the distinctive dot he placed above the mouthpiece from briar, and moved between briar and lucite for his inlays as well. All shaping, from rough carving to final polish, was done by hand: sanding disc, file, and sandpaper. The only job he left to a machine was turning the tenon; he spun it on a small lathe and finished the fit by hand. He brought his smooth-surfaced examples up through fine sandpaper before staining and waxing them.

He never invested in sandblasting equipment, for reasons of both space and cost. Because he chose to carve a pipe whenever a block didn't lend itself to a smooth surface, roughly four-fifths of his output stayed rustic-finished. Nor did he push his shape repertoire; his work turns around standard shapes and their close variants. How many pipes he produced depended entirely on the time left over from his job, and by the mid-1990s his yearly average exceeded a hundred.

Smoking Architecture

That he came to pipemaking after a long career as a pipe smoker is clearly visible in his dimensioning. It was a design requirement for him that a pipe cleaner reach the bottom of the chamber without removing the mouthpiece, and he bored the airway wide enough for an easy draw. He tapered the chamber slightly, but never so much as to keep the tamper from reaching the bottom, and he rounded the mouthpiece's lip edge so it wouldn't bite into the tongue. The chamber also went through a two-stage process: first removing excess resin from the wood, then coating the interior with his own carbon mixture. Such details are considered the points where pipes from a single hand part ways with mass production.

Path, Awards, and Stamp

Weiner smoked cigarettes for many years before switching to the pipe in 1979, and quickly turned to collecting. What opened the door to pipemaking was the death, in 1989, of his grandfather, a die-modeler by trade: the drill press, two motors, a set of files, and countless drill bits he inherited formed the core of the first bench he designed. His method took shape in the summer of 1990 after he visited Mike Butera's workshop in Houston; Butera remained both his benchmark and the maker who influenced him most. He attended his first show as a maker in 1991, was twice voted best pipemaker at the C.O.R.P.S. gatherings in Richmond, and received an honor award at the PCCA show in Washington; the years of these awards vary between 1991 and 1994 depending on the source.

His stamp carries the maker's name and the words "U.S.A.," accompanied by size markings such as "XL" on larger examples. Weiner numbered and dated every pipe he made: the last two digits of the code give the year, and the digits before them give its sequence within that year. Production stopped entirely with the maker's early death, and the limited number of surviving grain-figured smooth examples have continued to draw collector interest.