Here is another post by Brian Devlin. I enjoy reading about and seeing photos of his refurbishing work. I am again posting this piece for your viewing. I wrote and asked Brian about more of his process in cleaning stems and rims and he answered with a pm on Smokers Forums. I have integrated that into the text of this piece for those who are interested in knowing more. Without further delay here is Brian’s article.

I picked up another eBay buy that needed a bit of work. This one was a dirty Hilson Giant badly charred rim and heavily oxidized stem. What it looked like when it arrived can be seen in the photo below.

Once again I followed my process of cleaning and refurbishing. I begin by always cleaning the oxidation from the stem. I coated the stem spigot (tenon) and the Hilson logo with Vaseline to protect them from damage by the bleach soak.

I then put the stem in the bleach soak. For this I use an old butter box half filled with a mixture of 50% bleach and 50% water and let it soak for 30 minutes. I have found that this amount of time in the wash works well to remove the oxidation.

I rinse of the stem and then reassemble the pipe. I attach it to a retort to clean out the inside of the bowl, shank and stem. I use 99.9% isopropyl with the retort. You can see how I set up the retort in the photo below. For the heat source I use canned heat (editor’s note: in North America Sterno makes a product that works very well for this. Great idea Brian!).

The stem is pitted after soaking in the bleach mixture so I just buff with brown stick (middle cut) followed by white stick (finishing cut). For the rim I use white stick to polish the rim taking off the char build up. I finish by using Carnauba resin on an open mop (buffing pad) to finish the briar and the stem. It seems to stop the stem from oxidizing. I then buff the pipe and you have BRIAR REBORN!