My name is Shawn. I'm a newcomer to this site. I have been smoking Kirsten pipes exclusively since 1983 when I visited their shop at Fishermen's Terminal in Seattle. I've bought at least 20 of them over the years. In recent years I've just bought the parts as they wear out. Bowls and mouth pieces, the rest never wears out.
Old man Kirsten was an engineer for Boeing aircraft when he invented the pipe. The originals were made from old aluminum aircraft wings. The shop and factory are still owned by the family.
Why Fishermen's terminal? Because the biggest fans of the pipe were fishermen out of Seattle and up in Alaska. They were durable (once dropped one 20 stories into a swimming pool and was smoking it 30 minutes later), easy to clean (all you need is a paper towel and a pipe cleaner), cool to smoke, had interchangeable parts and you could stop the draft and put out the pipe if you wished in the middle of a smoke.
Each pipe has four pieces, the bowl (mostly briar but corn cob and other stuff too), the stem (an aluminum hollow tube, the valve (makes it esy to clen the stem and turs to cut off the draft) and the mouth piece. The mouth piece has a built in pipe cleaning rod.