England
The Frenchman Emil Loewe was seemingly the first in England who started making pipes of briar in 1856. And he was seemingly one of the first introduced “military” mouthpieces (spigots) – for a simple reason to facilitate the production of replacement stems for customers. Since then and till absorption by Cadogan in 1979 Loewe occupies strongly a niche of the one of the most successful and collected trademarks in the upper middle segment. This pipe is made not later than 1967, it was smoked moderately and very accurately. And of course “Birmingham” means not a place of production, but the model name 🙂
The pipe markings are”(L&Co) \ STANDARD”, “BIRMINGHAM”, “LOEWE \ LONDON W.”. The length is 13.6 cm (5.35″), bowl’s height is 4.6 cm (1.81″). External diameter of the bowl is 3.6 cm (1.42″), internal diameter is 1.9 cm (0.75″). The depth is 3.8 cm (1.5″) and this pipe weights 32 gr. Briar, vulcanite stem, no filter. The lip was slightly corected – you may identify the track under a bright light. There is a very small spacing (a few tenth of mm) between the stem and shank but the stems sits snuggly and reliably and we didn’t see any need to correct something.
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