Ragtime musician carves out side business making wooden pipes
Sporting a handlebar moustache and a steel-stringed acoustic guitar, a young man strums the nostalgic tunes of Scott Joplin, Blind Blake and others from an era gone by. Beside him sits an antique suitcase filled with wooden pipes of varying sizes and shapes.
The mustachioed man is Calum Jackson, a self-described "ragtimey" musician and popular busker in Fredericton.
He's also a craftsman. Barked Pipes is his side business, making and selling hand-carved pipes made from New Brunswick wood. Jackson scavenges wood from the backyards of his parents and friends. He uses materials from all types of trees, but his favourites are cherry and apple — cherry for its smell and workability and apple for its shine.
"Apple is very difficult to work with, but it almost has a mirror finish when you're done, so the effort is worth it," Jackson said.
When he's gathering wood, he looks for interesting patterns and knots.
"Each branch kind of suggests where it could be a pipe," he said.
His larger and more ornate pipes come with a handmade booklet. Each features a sketch of the pipe on the cover, and the inside tells the buyer what kind of wood the pipe is made of, where it was collected and care and cleaning instructions.
Jackson got into wood carving by making chess sets. He was inspired when he saw an amber chess set in Blair Castle on a trip to Scotland with his family.
"After I carved some chess sets and my first couple of pipes, I realized how beautiful any old piece of wood can be. If you give it time and attention, you can create something really pretty," he said.
It can take him anywhere from two to 16 hours to finish a pipe, and that doesn't include the months of drying time from when he gathers to wood to when he finally starts working on it.
Most of his pipes are two pieces — a stem and a bowl. Some have a third connecting piece, and Jackson has made ones with up to nine pieces before.
Jackson's carving skills are self-taught from books, online tutorials and trial-and-error. He said the biggest challenge is holding the small pieces of wood as he works on them.
"I think the real draw of these pipes is the imperfections in the wood. I don't use perfect pieces of wood; it's not going to be a perfect pipe."
Jackson said the process of making a pipe can be tedious sometimes.
"There's so much sanding," he said.
One of his favourite pipes is a foot long with a slender black walnut stem and a round polished apple bowl. There's a dark spot on the light wood of the bowl that looks a little like a bruise on an apple.
He's currently trying to sell it for $180 dollars. His smallest pipes can go for around $20 dollars.
Jackson said people can smoke whatever they want in the pipe; he just makes them. He doesn't recommend switching substances in the same pipe, however, because the wood absorbs the flavour of what's smoked in it.
Currently, Jackson is working on building up an inventory. He sells his pipes himself and in Bellwether, a vintage store on Queen Street.
"I've tried having my pipes in smoke shops and there never seems to be much interest ... I think there's a different type of customer that goes into a smoke shop, they usually know what they are going to get, just go and get that, whereas with Bellwether people are going to see what's in the store."
For Jackson, the draw to woodcarving isn't sales, it's the artistry.
"I just like to carve. I like the look of making something with the bark still on it," he said.
"When I started doing this it was just a bit of wanting to make something, wanting to have something that is going to outlive me. You know a piece of wood is going to decompose a lot slower than me."
