Work starts early at Special K Glass, where Kris Uhlhorn and his squad comprise a well-oiled, lean, mean, bong-making machine, soundtracked by the roar of a furnace and MF DOOM’s “Rapp Snitch Knishes.”
The team gets to work each day around 7:30 a.m., handing off each step of the process to the next person with assembly-line efficiency. Each piece takes just minutes to make inside the Goshen garage space, charting a path from red-hot molten glass to bespoke pieces outfitted with speckled colors and added spirals.
Call them bongs, water pipes, functional glass, whatever you’d like: Uhlhorn’s bread-and-butter product occupies a number of strange half-spaces between stereotypical college dorm-room movie prop and investment-worthy functional pieces and artwork, as well as between still federally illegal drug paraphernalia and accepted fixture of a cannabis culture now more mainstream than ever.
In 2003, a crackdown on paraphernalia called Operation Pipe Dreams brought federal agents to the front doors of big names in cannabis, including Tommy Chong as well as prominent Eugene-based pipe glassblower Jerome Baker, for selling pipes over the internet…