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6 photographsArchive Record FUH-DFPU-UERP-5
Era undetermined
Reference example
This pipe is documented here as an example for study — it is a record in the archive, not an item offered for sale. Everything below is what the piece itself, and the evidence around it, will honestly support.
Original stem
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Stem replaced or re-cut
No
Faridunhill standing declaration
Rim cleaned (no wood removed)
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Refinished
No
Faridunhill standing declaration
Chamber reamed
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Smoked
Yes
owner stated
Facts, not a grade. We do not score a pipe out of ten: a number would rank a restored pipe above an honest one, and restoration is exactly what this hobby prices down. Every line above is checkable by anyone holding the pipe. Lines marked Faridunhill standing declaration rest on our published, dated statement of shop practice (v1.0, 2026-07-29) — not on an inspection of this individual pipe. It is one document, in public, that you can hold us to.
This archive entry documents an estate pipe of the American Custom-Bilt marque, presented in a carved finish and identified by the owner as a Rhodesian Billiard. The description unites two classic shape vocabularies: the Billiard, the foundational straight form of the pipe canon with an upright cylindrical bowl, and the Rhodesian, traditionally distinguished by a rounded, beaded bowl of squat proportion. Hybrid readings of this kind are common in American factory production, where shape naming was looser than in the English tradition, and the carved surface treatment noted here is entirely in keeping with the house style. Custom-Bilt occupies a distinctive place in American pipe history. The name itself is a dating tool for the brand at large: the hyphenated 'Custom-Bilt' spelling belongs to the Mincer period, while the later consolidated 'Custombilt' stamp marks production after the brand changed hands in the post-war years, when manufacture continued under new ownership into subsequent decades. Because attribution of this example rests on the owner's identification rather than on transcribed stampings, the archive assigns it the conservative bracket appropriate to the marque as a whole: twentieth-century American manufacture, undated. Should the nomenclature on the shank be transcribed in future, the hyphenation of the stamp would permit a narrower placement within the brand's chronology. The record stands as a reference for the carved American estate pipe tradition that Custom-Bilt did much to define.
2023-01-14
Logged from the Faridunhill archive — photographed and posted on Instagram, 2023-01-14.
2023-01-16
Sold through eBay for USD 65. No buyer is recorded.
2026-07-29
5 checklist facts recorded under Faridunhill's standing declaration of shop practice (2026-07-29).
2026-08-28
Honesty pass: statements the source does not support were removed (era '20th century; 1 unsupported/absence sentence(s) removed from the essay).
This record is append-only. Nothing is deleted — a correction is a new entry that supersedes the old one, and both stay visible.
USD 65sold 2023-01-16 · eBay
From 1 recorded sale — this pipe, this day. A single transaction is not a market price, and we will never print one as if it were.
The sample this sits in: Faridunhill has recorded 8 sales of Custom-Bilt between 2020–2023 — median $66, most falling between $29 and $75.
The date shown is the date of sale, not the date this page was published. Our own transaction record, published free. No buyer appears here — not a name, not initials, not a country. Counted across both of our channels — eBay 2015–2022 and Etsy 2022–2026 — so the series is continuous and a change of marketplace is never read as a change in price.
Nobody leaves empty-handed. If you hold the catalogue page, the dated advertisement, or a hallmarked sibling that closes one of these — or simply own this model and can measure yours — send it in. Contributions are checked, credited to you by name, and the record is updated with the date it changed.
Instagram post, 2023-01-14. Published to a third-party platform on that date and archived since — a timestamp we cannot move. It is evidence that this object existed and looked like this, then.
The photographs are the identity. 6 images of this pipe's grain, stamping and stem are held as its fingerprint. The handle above is only a handle: lose it, and the pipe can still be matched back to this record from its grain.