Blog by Steve Laug

When I saw this one show up on EBay I had to have it. Multiple reasons made it one that I wanted to own. The first is that I love the older BBB pipes. I like the way they look and smoke. I like the classic shapes and the old patinas that grace them. Then of course for me was the fact that in my reading and buying estates I had not come across this line of BBB pipes. It was new to me. So I placed a bid on it and won it – it turns out that I was the only bidder so no surprise really.

The first series of four pictures show the pipe as it appeared on EBay. The finish looked to be very worn, the stem oxidized but it did look promising to me. It looked like it would need a bit of work to bring it back to life. The stain would probably have to be redone. The stem cleaned and polished and who knows what the inside would be like. The second picture gave me a bit of hope that maybe the pictures were not quite the whole story. The final picture of the bowl looked like it may have been over reamed and I wondered if there was not a crack in the bowl. But I would know more when it arrived.

When the box arrived from England I opened it to see what would await me in terms of cleanup and restoration. You can imagine my expectations and what went through my mind as I cut the tape and the wrapping paper to open the box. When I took the bubble wrap off of the pipe and stem I was amazed at the pipe. It did not even look like the one in the pictures above. The three pictures below show the pipe just after I took it out of the box. The stem was slightly oxidized but the finish was actually not too bad at all. It was nothing that a good buff with some carnauba could not take care of.

The next series of photos show what the pipe looked like once it was buffed and the stem polished and the oxidation removed. This probably took the least amount of effort to clean of any of my EBay purchases. Even the inside was very clean. The shank and bowl were clean. I ran a few pipe cleaners through to check it out and they came out spotless. There was no old tobacco smell to the pipe at all – it smelled new. I loaded it up and smoked some older Three Nuns that I had around and enjoyed what appeared to be a very clean pipe. The first smoke was clean and flavourful with no hints of ghosts or residual flavours that I have come to expect from old estate pipes. This one was like smoking a well broken in pipe that had been thoroughly cleansed and exorcised of previous ghosts. It has since become a favourite of mine!