Looking at the picture below, you might agree with her and think that I have lost whatever was left of what few brain cells that remain in my 57 year old head. My wife and daughters are likely convinced that this is closer to the truth than I care to admit.  I will even agree that while both you and they may be correct, you need to understand that I intentionally bid on and won this lot from EBay recently. While nobody else wanted the lot I did!

I just received them in the mail today. They came well packaged and labelled. In fact they were better packed than virtually every other pipe I have ever received from EBay shippers. The box was a solid 2”x4”x8” and stuffed with paper packing materials. The stems and pipes were then bagged and wrapped in bubble wrap and stuffed in among the packing papers. It was as if the seller was trying to protect a rare treasure. I opened the box and cut the tape on the packaging to expose the pipes inside. Five of the six pipes had cracked bowls and the sixth had a cracked shank and stuck stem. The bag included 9 extra stems that were actually quite old and three of those were military bits for spigot style pipes. The five cracked pipes were admittedly firewood and beyond repair.  The sixth one, with the split shank, which was the cleanest of all, could be repaired with glue and a band. I set it aside for a rustication project. In examining the split bowls I noted that they all had the same problem – a huge amount of cake. I am talking about cake so thick that you can barely stand a pipe nail spoon end down in some of the bowls. The cake had erupted from the tops of the bowls and had exerted so much pressure that the bowls were split in multiple places, as you can see in the picture below. It is a shame really as two of them, the ones with the stems on in the picture below, are opera pipes with oval bowls.

Now you might wonder why I would purchase this lot. It was not a surprise or a disappointment to me, after opening the box, because I had asked enough questions of the seller to know exactly what I was getting. I had been the sole bidder, no other competitors for the lot to drive the bid higher.  In the past, when no one else bid, it used to bother me because I asked myself what I was missing. You see I was not bidding on the pipes.  I could care less about these pieces of firewood that were beyond redemption. What I wanted in the lot were the older stems and I bid accordingly, and I ended up with 15 stems, once I took the pipes apart, added the stems from the lot and found an extra one in the box.  I could not have been happier because I prefer to use stems from a similar era to re-stem the older pipe bowls that I have. These stems provide me with a solid batch of stems and in the next few months they will have new bowls attached to them. The beauty of this lot is that none of the stems were chewed or gnawed, and only one has a very repairable tooth mark. In this sense the old stems were my real and intended acquisitions.

I am a scavenger of pipe parts. It only is a matter of perspective that enables one to see beyond burned out unsalvageable shells of pipes and identify the many salvageable parts they contain. There are always parts on the worst of them that I reuse – stems, bands, logos, etc. that can be scavenged and re-used.  I have a box of these parts that has come in handy more times than I can remember. But another good part of the lot is that once I clean up the older briar some of the shanks could provide the base for tampers and such. The rest may well go in the fire pit this summer but you never know. Part of my hunting through thrift shops, rummage sales, garage sales, and Craig’s List for pipes always includes the element of hunting for pipe parts. I have scavenged old broken KWs and Yello Boles and kept the stems to use on sister pipes. I have cleaned up chewed KW and GBD stems so that I could remove the logos and medallions and re-inserted them on new stems or stems missing the logos. Even these little parts are always removable and reusable. It only takes eyes to see the possibilities in old castoffs.

Only one final word… if you begin to pick up my scavenging ways make sure to leave some parts around for me. Also if you need someone to blame for your newly adopted bad habit I am more than willing to take the blame… for a small price – say a few stems and parts. That is it for now I am off to take apart those old pipes and strip them down.