Ken Barnes Returns To Finding The Grain - Pix Heavy

One of the great pleasures of being a member of the piping community is making friends in it. For the past several years, Ken and I have kept up an interesting and lively correspondence. Ken is one of the nicest people I know.

So when Ken let me know that he had returned to pipe making I was excited by the news.

For those of you not familiar with Ken's story, Ken started at Charatan as a teenager, learning all aspects of the craft under the mentoring of Chief Carver Barry Jones, and later went on to Co-Found James Upshall Pipes.

Ken is famous for his ability to "find the grain" in a block of briar, and cut that briar to bring the most out of it. Pete Siegel, Upshall's US distributor, said that it was as though Ken had x-ray vision. He could look at a block and "see" where the grain was going inside of it. He's still doing that.

Ken sent me two of his pipes to show at the WCPS. I hadn't intended to sell them. One of them, an exquisite billiard with a little Bang influence in the shaping, got away, but I refused to part with this one:













I can see some of the Charatan/Upshall lineage in this pipe, along with Ken's own spin.

Rick Newcombe got three pipes from Ken, and we met up at the WCPS and created a little display at Rick's table. Rick kept one and sold the other two that he had. So, we can truthfully say that we sold all of Ken's pipes that were available for sale at the WCPS.

Ken loves the classic shapes, and looks for blocks whose grain will allow him to carve a classic straight grain. It's a bit of a tightrope walk since classical shapes have well defined definitions of shape and proportion, so it's different than "following the grain". He studies the block, decides what classical shape that block will yield, then removes the excess material, freeing the pipe from its confines.

Ken's pipes will be available for purchase at Scandpipes, and Ken is setting up his own website.