This is the second heirloom pipe send to me for work, along with the Medico Square Pot about which I wrote last time. This time I’m working on an LL Bean Bent Billiard fitted with an interesting Smokemaster filter system first produced by Briarcraft in the USA in the early 210th Century, and again later by Grabow between the mid 1960s and 1990s. We’ll take a closer look at the system later, but for now let’s focus on the pipe itself.

As this first series of pics illustrates, the pipe arrived in two pieces, with the remains of the stem tenon lodged inside the pipe’s shank. The rim of the bowl was hidden under a crust of carbon “lava”, but not enough to disguise a fair amount of dents and dings around the outer rim edge. As the rest of the stummel was in good shape, these dents are most…