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5 photographsArchive Record FUH-YNFY-6UX5-G
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
Faridunhill standing declaration
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 reference example is a smooth, straight Billiard of the Carey Magic Inch line, marked with United States patent number 3267941. The Billiard is the foundational shape of the pipe-making canon: a cylindrical bowl set at a right angle to a straight shank of roughly equal length, with a stem continuing the shank's line to the bit. Its proportions are the yardstick against which most other classic shapes are measured, and a smooth finish on a Billiard presents the grain of the wood without carving or texture to distract from the form. The Magic Inch is the signature system of E. A. Carey, an American mail-order pipe house that built its identity around this patented smoking mechanism rather than around bench-made prestige. In the Magic Inch design, the stem incorporates a vented chamber positioned between shank and bit — the 'inch' of the name — through which smoke passes and mixes with air admitted by small openings, with an absorbent paper sleeve fitted inside to condense and capture moisture. The stated aim of the system was a cooler, drier smoke than a conventional straight-bore pipe could deliver, and the design was promoted heavily through direct advertising in the decades after its introduction, making Carey pipes widely distributed in the United States. Dating rests on the patent stamping. The archive records the piece as a representative document of a patent-driven American smoking system in the classic Billiard form.
2023-03-25
Logged from the Faridunhill archive — photographed and posted on Instagram, 2023-03-25.
2023-06-02
Sold through Etsy for USD 33. No buyer is recorded.
2026-07-29
6 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 'post-1966, second half of the 20' -> undetermined; 2 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 33sold 2023-06-02 · Etsy
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 28 sales of Carey between 2016–2024 — median $30, most falling between $19 and $38.
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, 2023-03-25. 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. 5 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.