Blog by Steve Laug

I find that I enjoy smoking pipe with horn stems. The feel in the mouth is unique in range of pipe stem material. It is not hard like Lucite nor is it like Vulcanite. There is a very different feel in the mouth than anything else. I really don’t know how to describe it – it is smooth like well-polished Vulcanite or Lucite. It is soft like Vulcanite but somehow a different kind of softness. It has a luminescence that is beautiful when polished to a reflective sheen. It that almost indescribable feel that keeps me on the lookout for more horn stemmed pipes. I think that I have probably a half dozen in my rack at the moment. All but one of them is small bowled and lightweight. All of them are great Virginia Flake pipes and seem to be made for that style of tobacco.

Here  is a few of my horn stem pipes.

The pipe below is one I added recently. It is the fourth pipe from the left in the picture above. It is an Oldenkott pipe. When I got it the finish was rough as it seemed to have had a varnish or some kind of topcoat on the bowl that was flaking off and broken. The bowl was unevenly caked but the pipe showed promise. I reamed and cleaned it then put it in the alcohol bath while I worked on the stem. The stem had a few minor bit marks that I repaired by sanding them smooth. The tooth chatter disappeared in the same manner. I have found that with horn I have to be a bit careful with the sanding so that the horn itself does not sliver or splinter so I used micromesh pads exclusively on this one. I started with 1500 grit and sanded up to 6000 grit. Then I took the stem to the buffer and carefully buffed it with White Diamond.

After removing the bowl from the alcohol bath the finish coat of varnish was gone and the colour looked very nice so I sanded it with micromesh pads and then buffed the bowl with White Diamond. I reinserted the stem and gave the pipe several coats of carnauba to bring back the sheen to both the horn and the bowl. The final picture shows the unique tenon and filter apparatus on this pipe. It is aluminum and seems to work as a condensation chamber more than a filter. The shank and stem were clean on the inside and took very little work to clean out the tars that were present.