Il Duca: Smooth Shield with Bamboo (D) Tobacco Pipe

Smokingpipes began hosting the American Pipe Making Expo in 2015, soliciting submissions from North America's premier carvers and affording them the opportunity to showcase their most inventive and creative work. For 2024, to celebrate the Expo's 10th anniversary, we've expanded our scope to accommodate carvers from all over the world, turning the American Pipe Making Expo into the Global Pipe Making Expo. Like in years past, the 2024 Expo revolves around a core theme, and appropriately, given the event's birthday, we've returned to our very first Expo's theme: bamboo.

Max Rimensi, the carver behind Il Duca pipes, is a true student of pipe making, taking inspiration from a wide range of design traditions and synthesizing them into a style that's singularly his own. Like the Elephant's Foot and the Ballerina, the Shield was originally pioneered by Bo Nordh, and it's defined by a distinct bowl, shaped to resemble its namesake and defined by a protruding fore wall and a crisp ridgeline that frames grain across the bowl's fore and aft. Rimensi has lovingly recreated the shape while imbuing it with his own sensibility, orienting the aforementioned ridgeline in a slightly asymmetrical fashion. This subtle change lends the form an added touch of whimsy and accentuates the bowl's soft forward cant, all while artfully framing a sea of birdseye at the pipe's fore and tight bands of cross grain along the bowl's aft.

Out back, a trim shank emerges from the bowl's low-set transition and quickly surrenders to three knuckles of bamboo. The bamboo's unique coloration makes it the perfect bridge between the warm complexion of the stummel and the darker hues of the stem, with each node of the bamboo being lighter in color while the interconnecting portions are significant darker, splitting the difference between the two disparate ends of the color spectrum.