I’ve wanted to add a Brigham Club pipe to my collection for some time, so when I spotted this 4 Dot version on eBay recently, I knew I’d be bidding, despite the pipe’s obvious shortcomings. The auction listing clearly showed one major problem – the lower portion of the stem’s bite/button area was missing a large chunk of material.

It’s times like this that being both a collector and a restorer comes in handy; as it turned out, the damage, which I knew I could repair, was sufficient to make other potential buyers a bit gun-shy and I ended up winning the pipe for a very reasonable price.

I took this series of pictures when the pipe arrived on my worktable. As you can see, a Club pipe to Brigham is a Lovat to just about everyone else, the saddle-stemmed, round-shanked cousin to the Canadian pipe shape. Apart from the…