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Restoring Barry’s Dad’s Pipes #4 – a very old GBD Squat Bulldog R9019

Blog by Steve Laug

Late in the summer of 2017 I received an email on rebornpipes blog from Barry in Portland, Oregon. He wanted to know if I would be interested in purchasing his Dad’s pipes. I have finished three of them so far, a 1939 Dunhill Patent Shell Bulldog, a Comoy’s Grand Slam Zulu and a Comoy’s London Pride Liverpool. After I finished the second pipe Barry wrote me an email that gave me a little more information on his Dad and incidentally on himself as this pipe was one of his own. Here is what he wrote me.

Steve, — Another great restoration and writing to go with it. I appreciate these pipes more watching the work it takes to get them in good condition.

Your (mine?) floral words about my father are perhaps a little deceptive. Inside that man was a lifelong Bolshevik. Who yearned for the revolution and settled for the party of Roosevelt. His parents were born in the Russian Empire (Ukraine), his father having escaped after brief detention during the 1905 failed uprising and to avoid conscription. His father was gruff, a bit crude and all politics. Given those origins he made the best of himself, had tons of friends and would have been a great social worker.

I misled you on the origin of his pipe conversion. It seems clear based on the 1939 pipe that he smoked a pipe in college, returning to them after the 1964 Surgeon General ‘s report on the danger of cigarettes. After that he only reverted to cigarettes at moments of great stress, a death, business setback or a fight with his wife.

He gave me two pipes in college – the GBD bulldog and a “Parker”. The latter I used to smoke a few times but found I was allergic to it, fortunately. The GBD was to get girls with an MGB, a Harris Tweed sport coat with leather elbow patches and jug wine. Didn’t work. Stanford women were in revolt and saw through the pretense. I put both pipes away for nearly fifty years and now they are in your good hands. — Barry

Barry and I corresponded back and forth and concluded our deal. I became the proud owner of his Dad’s pipes. The inventory of the pipes he would be sending included some real beauties – Comoy’s, Parkers, Dunhills and some no name brands. They were beautiful and I could not wait to see them. I had him send them to Jeff where he would clean them up before I received them. Jeff took some photos of the lot as he opened the box. Each pipe was individually wrapped with bubble wrap and taped to protect them. There were 25 bubble wrapped packages and a lot of pipe accessories included – pipe racks, reamers, scrapers and Comoy’s filters and washers. There were pipe pouches and a wooden cigar box that held all of the accessories and reamers. There was a boxed KleenReem pipe reamer that was virtually unused. Jeff unwrapped the pipes and took pictures of the estate showing both the pipes and the accessories. Barry had labeled each pipe with a sticky note. It was an amazing addition to my pipe and tool collection. The next pipe I chose to work on from the collection was GBD Squat Bulldog, the first of three GBD pipes. This pipe had the original stem and was in good condition. It was stamped on the left side of the shank GBD in an oval. On the right side of the shank it read London over England with shape number R9019. I was unfamiliar with the / shape number designation so I looked it up on a GBD Shape Number Chart and found that it was not listed on the charts that I could access on the web. I would call it a squat Bulldog.

I wrote an email to Al Jones (upshallfan) to see if he could throw any light on the shape number on the pipe. Al loves GBD pipes as much as I do and is compiling a shape chart so I thought he might give some insight on the R shape and potentially on the 9019. Here is what he wrote back.

…The R code pipes are oddballs with shape numbers I’ve never seen duplicated elsewhere. Like my 1937 R9249. It’s clearly the 9242 shape, who knows what the R code means. I’ve never seen R code shapes in any literature, so they may have been one-off’s. They all seem to have silver hallmarked bands. I speculate that perhaps the R shapes were given to special pipes pulled from the production line for silver work. Sadly, that is all lost to time… – Al

It seems that the information on the shape and R code is not to be found at this time so I decided to move ahead with the shank band. It was a Sterling Silver Band with the GBD oval logo over three hallmarks over MR&Cie. I looked up the history of GBD pipes on Pipedia and found this (https://pipedia.org/wiki/GBD) information.

In 1850 three gentlemen got together in Paris to establish a firm dedicated to the fabrication of Meerschaum pipes – a courageous step in politically restless times. Ganneval probably came from the area of Saint-Claude where he had learned making wooden pipes. Bondier’s family obviously came from Paris and had immigrated in 1789 to Geneva. He himself had worked as a wood turner in the clay and china pipe industry in and around Saint-Claude making stem extensions etc. Donninger was an Austrian or Swiss and had worked in Vienna, the world’s center of the Meerschaum pipe. They agreed on the acronym GBD selecting the initials of their surnames. Bondier survived his partners for nearly 30 years. Their places were taken by others. Hence the property of GBD and therewith the company’s official name changed several times.

Ganneval, Bondier & Donninger

Bondier, Ulrich & Cie.

Bine, Marechal & Cie. and finally

A. Marechal, Ruchon & Cie.

Meanwhile the GBD name was well established and thus retained. August Marechal and Ferdinand Ruchon led the firm into the 20th century. They were in charge of the company for more than 50 years…

GBD became a British company soon after the turn of the century! In 1902 Marechal and Ruchon sold GBD to A. Oppenheimer & Co. in London. Charles Oppenheimer had founded this successful trade business in 1860 as an import-/export house. His brothers David and Adolphe and brother-in-law Louis Adler soon joined him. Adolphe took over when Charles went to Germany as British ambassador. Briar pipes were among the first products traded. The business relation to GBD in Paris began as early as 1870. Being the most important customer in the English speaking world, Oppenheimer & Co. were designated as sole distributor for Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 1897. Especially Adolphe Oppenheimer had a burning interest in the pipe business, and Louis’ son James Adler shared that. He should play the most important role in the amicable merger of GBD. A. Marechal, Ruchon and Cie. in Paris was now Marechal, Ruchon & Co. Ltd. (see Marechal Ruchon & Cie. page) – a British firm with four directors: Adolphe Oppenheimer and James Adler had their seat in the head office in London while Auguste Marechal and Ferdinand Ruchon went on leading the GBD factory in the Rue des Balkan in Paris, which was considerably extended and modernised. Ruchon acted as CEO.

I knew from the above history that the pipe was made before 1902 in that Marechal and Ruchon sold GBD to Oppenheimer & Co. in London at that time (I have marked that part of the text in bold Red above). Now I needed to see if I could narrow down the date on the pipe. Since there was a Sterling Silver Band on the shank I figured that close examination would give me clues in the form of hallmarks in the silver. This particular band had three hallmarks that helped to identify the city of manufacture, the composition of the band and the date of the pipe. From left to right the hallmarks are as follows: the first is an “A”, followed by a prancing Lion, and the final one is what looks like the head of leopard. Here is a closeup photo of the hallmarks.

I did some research on the British Silver Hallmarks website to see if I could pin down a date and information on the meaning of the hallmarks (http://www.925-1000.com/british_marks.html). The first thing I learned was that the Lion (the second hallmark) indicated that the band was .925 Sterling Silver (See A in the photo below).The last hallmark is a city mark and in this case is identical to the second leopard’s head in the photo below. That told me that the band was made in London and since it was the crownless leopard’s head I knew that the pipe was made between 1822- and the present.Now I knew that the band identified the pipe as made in London and the band was .925 Sterling Silver. I still needed to identify the date from the first hallmark – the letter “A”. I clicked on the link in the above photo that took me to a chart with the date letters. I have included that here for your use. It appears that the year that the pipe was made was 1876 as the letter “A” looks the most like that particular hallmark. I have put a red box around the date and hallmark in the photo below.So Barry’s Dad had given him this little 1876 Squat Bulldog to take to college with him. That is pretty remarkable. This beautiful little Bulldog has a double ring below the cap. There is a small piece missing between the rings on the front of the bowl. The pipe has a diamond shaped shank. The finish was dirty and filled with the detritus of years of use followed by sitting unused. The bowl was thickly caked and had an overflow of lava on the rounded rim top. Even through the grime and grit you can still see the amazing birdseye on the sides and cross grain on the front and back of the bowl. The Sterling Silver was oxidized and almost black but the marking was readable. The stem is a diamond shanked saddle with an older style button and slot. It is most likely the original stem but does not have a brass rondel on the side. (Although it could also certainly be a well-made replacement stem that his father had paid a great craftsman to make for the pipe as he had for several of the Comoy’s pipes.) It was lightly oxidized and had tooth chatter and marks on both sides of the stem at the button. Jeff took photos of the pipe before he cleaned it up. The photos tell the story better than my words can. He took some close up photos of the bowl and rim top to show the cake and the condition. He also took photos to show the grain on the side, front and underside of the bowl. There was a fairly large piece of briar missing on the ring between the two bands toward the front of the bowl (seen in the second photo below). The third photo shows some road rash on the cap at the front of the bowl above the missing piece of briar. I would need to make a decision about how far to go in restoring this one. Did I remove the marks on the rim cap? Did I repair the chip out of the spacer between the two rings? That would need to be decided. He also photographed the stamping on both sides of the shank to show what it read and the condition of the stamping. The left side of the shank is stamped with the GBD oval and on the silver band the same oval is over the three hallmarks as spoken of above and underneath that is stamped MR&Cie. On the right side it is stamped London over England with the shape number R9019. The stem was made of hard rubber and was oxidized as mentioned above and had tooth chatter and marks. Jeff took photos of both sides of the stem to capture their condition before he cleaned the pipe.Jeff once again did his usual great job on cleaning this pipe, leaving it pristine and without damage to the finish. He reamed the bowl with a PipNet pipe reamer and cleaned up the remnants with the Savinelli Fitsall Pipe Knife. He scrubbed out the mortise and the airway in the shank and the stem with alcohol, cotton swabs and pipe cleaners. He scrubbed the exterior of the bowl, rim and shank with a tooth brush and Murphy’s Oil Soap to remove the grime of the smooth finish on the bowl and shank. He rinsed it under running water. He dried it off with a soft cloth. Once the dust and debris were removed the finish looked very good. He soaked the stem in Before & After Pipe Stem Deoxidizer to remove the light oxidation, rinsed it with warm water and dried it off. I took photos of the pipe to show its condition before I started my work on it. I took some close up photos of the bowl, rim top and damaged area on the front as well as both sides of the stem to show their condition. The bowl was very clean and the rim top had some nicks on both the inner and outer, some scorching and general darkening. He had been able to remove the lava from the finish. The inner edge was in excellent condition and the roughness of the outer edge was visible. I also took a photo of the damaged area between the double rings toward the front right side of the bowl. The stem is lightly oxidized as can be seen in the photos and has small tooth marks near the button on both sides. I started with the stem on this one. I sanded out the tooth chatter and the tooth marks next to the button on both sides and the repair on the top of the button with 220 grit sandpaper followed by 400 grit wet dry sandpaper.I polished stem with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12000 grit pads. I wiped the stem down with Obsidian Oil after each pad. I polished it with Before & After Pipe Stem Polish, both Fine and Extra Fine. I gave it a final coat of Obsidian Oil and set it aside to dry. I worked on the damaged rim top, edges, bevel and the small marks and nicks on it 200 grit sandpaper to smooth out the damage and blend it with the rest of the rim. The rounded edges of the rim cap needed to be cleaned up. I polished the rim with micromesh sanding pads – 1500-12000 grit micromesh sanding pads. I wiped it down after each pad to check on the progress. I worked Before & After Restoration Balm deep into the briar on the smooth finish to clean, enliven and protect it. I wiped it off with a soft cloth. I buffed the bowl with a cotton cloth to polish it. It really began to have a deep shine in the briar. I took some photos of the bowl at this point to mark the progress in the restoration. The grain on the bowl is really beginning to stand out and will only do so more as the pipe is waxed. This is one of the oldest GBD pipes that I have worked on. I am not sure the stem is original or a replacement but it is definitely older. I wonder if Barry’s Dad did not have a replace done for this old pipe the same time he did for the 1939 Dunhill Patent Shell. I suppose we will never know. The vulcanite is high quality and shined up well. I decided to leave the small nicks and the damage to the ring as it tells the story of this old timer. I put the stem back on the bowl and worked the pipe over on the buffing wheel using Blue Diamond to polish the stem. I buffed the bowl and the stem to raise the shine on the briar and the vulcanite. I was careful to not buff the stamping and damage it. I gave the bowl and stem multiple coats of carnauba wax. I buffed the entire pipe with a clean buffing pad to raise the shine. I hand buffed it with a microfiber cloth to deepen the shine. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. The rich brown stain allows the grain to really stand out on this little pipe and it works well with the rich black of the polished vulcanite stem. This GBD Squat Bulldog is a beautiful looking pipe. The dimensions of the pipe are: Length: 5 1/2 inches, Height: 1 1/2 inches, Outside Diameter: 1 3/4 inches, Diameter of the chamber: 3/4 inches. This 1876 GBD is one that fits well in my collection of older pipes. There is something about these older GBDs that add a touch of real class. Thanks for walking through the restoration with me.

Restoring another of Barry’s Dad’s Pipes – a Comoy’s London Pride Extraordinaire 127/2

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Blog by Steve Laug

I could not remember where the London Pride fit in the ranks of Comoy’s pipe lines. I Googled the line and found a pipe on rebornpipes that I had previously worked on. In the blog I had written that Comoy’s had introduced the London Pride as the second grade to the Blue Riband around the same time to meet the American demand for a lighter finish. It was priced in 1943 at $25 and in 1965 at $25, then in 1979 at $95. It was described as having a natural amber coloring and tending to be Birdseye/Cross-Grained pattern pipes. At the time this pipe was made it was the next-to-top-of-the-line. The original stem had a three-piece “C” logo as did the one that I was working on.

I also wanted to have some idea of the date on this old pipe so I did a bit of digging on Pipedia. I found a helpful dating guide there. I found that the Comoy’s London Pride stamp on the shank dated it to the 1950s. At that time there were four variants to the stamping.

A simple block-letter style without serifs but with the C larger than the other letters and the apostrophe before the “S”.
A return to the slightly more fancy block letters with serifs and the apostrophe. (It seems that some grades carried different stamps, or at least that the stamping changed in different years for some grades.)
A simple block-letter style without serifs and without the apostrophe and with the “C” the same size as the rest of the letters. This stamp was probably not used very long.
A simple block-letter style without serifs but with the apostrophe before the “S” and with the “C” the same size as the rest of the letters.

Variant number 1 fits the style of stamping on this pipe. It is stamped with capital letters, block style without serifs and having an apostrophe between the Y and the S of Comoy’s. The C of Comoy’s was larger than the other letters. That helped me identify the pipe as coming from the 1950s.
The COM stamp (Country of Manufacture) is like the one in the picture to the left. The picture shows exactly what is stamped on the shank of this pipe. It is stamped in a circle with “MADE” at the top, “IN” in the middle, and “LONDON” at the bottom, with “ENGLAND” in a straight line beneath. According to the Pipedia article it can be assumed that this stamp was first used in the export drive in the early 1950s. Here is the link to the article: https://pipedia.org/wiki/Comoy%27s_Dating_Guide

Here are some links that I have used in identifying and dating this pipe. https://rebornpipes.com/2014/01/06/refinishing-and-reworking-the-rim-on-a-comoys-london-pride/; https://pipedia.org/wiki/A_History_Of_Comoy%27s_and_A_Guide_Toward_Dating_the_Pipes;http://www.pipephil.eu/logos/en/logo-comoy.html

The finish on the pipe was dirty and filled with the detritus of years of use followed by sitting unused. The bowl was thickly caked and had an overflow of lava on the rim top. Even through the grime and grit you can still see the amazing birdseye on the sides and cross grain on the front and back of the bowl and the top and underside of the shank. The stem was well made and fit the shank perfectly. It was lightly oxidized and had tooth chatter and marks on both sides of the stem at the button. The surface edges of the button also had tooth marks that were present. The stem also bore the original Comoy’s three part “C” logo on the stem. The stem also had some calcification around the button as well that made me think that perhaps the stem had once sported a softee bit. Jeff took photos of the pipe before he cleaned it up. The photos tell the story better than my words can. He took some close up photos of the bowl and rim top to show the cake and the condition. He also took photos to show the grain on the side, front and underside of the bowl. There was a fairly large nick in the side of the bowl shown in the last photo. He also photographed the stamping on both sides of the shank to show what it read and the condition of the stamping. The left side is stamped Comoy’s over London Pride over Extraordinaire. The Extraordinaire stamp was used on large pipes. On the right side it is stamped with the Comoy’s Com stamp Made in London in a circle over England. Next to that is the shape number 127/2. The original stem has the three part Comoy’s C insert on the left side. The stem was oxidized as mentioned above and had tooth chatter and marks. Jeff took photos of both sides of the stem to capture their condition before he cleaned the pipe.Jeff did his usual great job on cleaning this pipe, leaving it pristine and without damage to the finish. He reamed the bowl with a PipNet pipe reamer and cleaned up the remnants with the Savinelli Fitsall Pipe Knife. He scrubbed out the mortise and the airway in the shank and the stem with alcohol, cotton swabs and pipe cleaners. He scrubbed the exterior of the bowl, rim and shank with a tooth brush and Murphy’s Oil Soap to remove the grime of the smooth finish on the bowl and shank. He rinsed it under running water. He dried it off with a soft cloth. Once the dust and debris were removed the finish looked very good. I took photos of the pipe to show its condition before I started my work on it. I took some close up photos of the bowl and rim top as well as both sides of the stem to show their condition. The bowl was very clean and the rim top looked good other thank some light nicks and darkening. He had been able to remove the lava from the finish. The inner edge was in excellent condition and the roughness of the outer edge in the early pictures above actually blended into the sandblast finish of the bowl. The stem is lightly oxidized as can be seen in the photos and has small tooth marks near the button on both sides and on top and the bottom of the button.I removed the stem and was surprised by the unique tenon with almost a nipple on the end of it. It is an integral part of the tenon. The inside airway on the tenon and stem have an inner tube that is inset in the stem and tenon to give strength to both.I started with the stem on this one. The next series of photos show the restoration process on the stem. I “painted” the tooth marks with the flame of a Bic lighter and was able raise most of them even with the surface of the stem. I used some clear super glue to fill in the tooth marks on the top and underside of the button surface and on the stem just ahead of the button that did not rise with the heat. Once the glue dried I sanded out the tooth chatter and the tooth marks next to the button on both sides and the repair on the top of the button with 220 grit sandpaper. I polished stem with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12000 grit pads. I wiped the stem down with Obsidian Oil after each pad. I polished it with Before & After Pipe Stem Polish, both Fine and Extra Fine. I gave it a final coat of Obsidian Oil and set it aside to dry. I worked on the darkened rim, inner edge bevel and the small marks and nicks on it with micromesh sanding pads. I lightly sanded it first with 220 grit sandpaper and followed it up with 1500-12000 grit micromesh sanding pads. I wiped it down after each pad to check on the progress. I worked Before & After Restoration Balm deep into the briar on the smooth finish to clean, enliven and protect it. I wiped it off with a soft cloth. I buffed the bowl with a cotton cloth to polish it. It really began to have a deep shine in the briar. I took some photos of the bowl at this point to mark the progress in the restoration. The grain on the bowl is really beginning to stand out and will only do so more as the pipe is waxed. I put the stem back on the bowl and worked the pipe over on the buffing wheel using Blue Diamond to polish the stem. I buffed the bowl and the stem with Blue Diamond polish to raise the shine on the briar and the vulcanite. I was careful to not buff the stamping and damage it. I gave the bowl and stem multiple coats of carnauba wax. I buffed the entire pipe with a clean buffing pad to raise the shine. I hand buffed it with a microfiber cloth to deepen the shine. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. The rich brown stain allows the grain to really stand out on this little pipe and it works well with the rich black of the polished vulcanite stem. This Comoy’s London Pride Liverpool is a beautiful looking pipe. The dimensions of the pipe are: Length: 6 inches, Height: 2 inches, Outside Diameter: 1 1/2 inches, Diameter of the chamber: 3/4 inches. This 1950s era Comoy’s is another one that will fit well in any pipeman’s collection and add a touch of real class. Thanks for walking through the restoration with me.

Farida’s Dad’s Pipes #4 – Restoring a Dunhill Red Bark Pot 43061

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Blog by Steve Laug

The next collection of pipes that I am working on comes from the estate of an elderly gentleman here in Vancouver. I met with his daughter Farida last summer and we looked at his pipes and talked about them then. Over the Christmas holiday she brought them by for me to work on, restore and then sell for her. There are 10 pipes in all – 7 Dunhills (one of them, a Shell Bulldog, has a burned out bowl), 2 Charatans, and a Savinelli Autograph. His pipes are worn and dirty and for some folks they have a lot of damage and wear that reduce their value. To me each one tells a story. I only wish they could speak and talk about the travels they have had with Farida’s Dad.

When I wrote the blog on the Classic Series Dunhill and thinking about its travels, Farida sent me an email with a short write up on her Dad. She remembered that I had asked her for it so that I could have a sense of the stories of her Dad’s pipes. Here is what she wrote: My dad, John Barber, loved his pipes. He was a huge fan of Dunhill and his favourite smoke was St. Bruno. No one ever complained of the smell of St. Bruno, we all loved it. I see the bowls and they’re large because he had big hands. When he was finished with his couple of puffs, he would grasp the bowl in the palm of his hand, holding the warmth as the embers faded. The rough bowled pipes were for daytime and especially if he was fixing something. The smooth bowled pipes were for an evening with a glass of brandy and a good movie. In his 20s, he was an adventurer travelling the world on ships as their radio operator. He spent a year in the Antarctic, a year in the Arctic and stopped in most ports in all the other continents. He immigrated to Canada in the mid-fifties, working on the BC Ferries earning money to pay for his education. He graduated from UBC as an engineer and spent the rest of his working life as a consultant, mostly to the mining companies. Whatever he was doing though, his pipe was always close by.

She sent along this photo of him with his sled dogs in the Antarctic sometime in 1953-1954. It is a fascinating photo showing him with a pipe in his mouth. He is happily rough housing with his dogs. As a true pipeman the cold does not seem to bother him at all.Thank you Farida for sending the photo and the background story on your Dad for me to use on the blog. I find that it really explains a lot about their condition and gives me a sense of who Dad was. If your Dad was rarely without a pipe I can certainly tell which pipes were his favourites. As I looked over the pipes I noted that each of them had extensive rim damage and some had deeply burned gouges in the rim tops. The bowls seemed to have been reamed not too long ago because they did not show the amount of cake I would have expected. The stems were all covered with deep tooth marks and chatter and were oxidized and dirty. The internals of the mortise, the airway in the shank and stem were filled with tars and oils. These were nice looking pipes when her Dad bought them and they would be nice looking one more when I finished.

I finished two of the pipes and have written a blog on each of them. The first one was the Dunhill Shell with the oval shank pot (https://rebornpipes.com/2018/02/04/restoring-a-1983-dunhill-shell-41009-oval-shank-pot/) and the second was the Dunhill Classic Series Shell Billiard (https://rebornpipes.com/2018/02/08/faridas-dads-pipes-2-restoring-a-1990-lbs-classic-series-dunhill-shell-billiard/). The third pipe I restored from the estate was a Savinelli Autograph (https://rebornpipes.com/2018/02/15/faridas-dads-pipes-3-restoring-a-savinelli-autograph-4/).

I went back to the Dunhills today so I chose to work on a Dunhill Red Bark 43061 pot. It was so dirty it was hard to tell what it looked like under the thick grime. The blast itself was almost filled in with thick, oily grime. I wiped the grime off the underside of the shank to be able to read the stamping. It was worn but readable. On the bottom of the bowl is the 43061 shape number. Next to that it is stamped Dunhill Red Bark over Made in England ¹⁷. Dating this pipe is a fairly easy proposition. You take the two digits following the D in England and add them to 1960. In this case it is 1960+17= 1977. (Pipephil’s site has a helpful dating tool for Dunhill pipes that I use regularly http://www.pipephil.eu/logos/en/dunhill/redbark1.html). The bowl was thickly caked and the cake had flowed over onto the light sandblast finish on the rim top forming a hard lava that made the top almost smooth. The inner and outer edges of the rim were damaged. On the front of the bowl the rim had been scraped and damaged and then burned. On the back edge there was the same kind of damage that was on the other Dunhill pipes in this estate. This one however was not quite as deep so it would need to be dealt with a bit differently when I got to that point. The stem was oxidized and calcified at the button end. There were tooth marks and chatter on both sides in front of the button. The Dunhill white spot was intact on the top of the stem. I took photos of the pipe to show what it looked like before I started the cleanup work. I took close up photos of the bowl and rim top as well as the stem. You can see the condition of the rim top and bowl in the first photo. The stem has tooth chatter and some deep bite marks on the top edge of the button and a deep tooth mark on the underside of the stem just ahead of the button. There is a lot of calcification and wear on the rest of the stem as well.I reamed the bowl with a PipNet reamer and I had to use three of the four cutting heads to clean out the cake. The bowl thickly caked so I started with the smallest of the three and worked my way up to the third which was about the same size as the bowl diameter. I took back the cake to bare briar. I took a photo of the cleaned bowl. I scrubbed the surface of the sandblast with Murphy’s Oil Soap and a tooth brush to clean out all of the dust. I worked on the top of the rim with a brass bristle wire brush and a brass bristle polishing brush to remove the lava on the rim. I scrubbed the stem with the tooth brush as well to remove the calcification and grime. I rinsed the pipe under warm running water to remove the dirt, grime and soap. I dried off the bowl with a soft rag. The cleaned and scrubbed pipe really made the rim top damage very clear. It looked to me that I would need to top the bowl. I cleaned up the reaming of the bowl with a Savinelli Fitsall Pipe Knife to remove the remaining cake that was on the walls around the airway and the lower part of the bowl.I topped the bowl to remove the damage to the top surface of the rim and clean up the damage to the edges. I did not have to remove a lot and repeatedly checked it to make sure that I had removed enough but not too much.I used a series of dental burrs on the Dremel to etch a pattern into the top of the rim to blend it into the sandblast around the bowl sides. It was not a deep sandblast so the pattern on the rim needed to be random looking and not deep. I wanted it to blend in the damaged area on the back side of the rim. The photo below shows the rusticated rim top and the three burrs that I used to create it.I restained the bowl and rim with a Mahogany stain pen. I wanted to match the colour of the Red Bark shown in the photo below. After I stained the pipe with the Mahogany and I used a red oil based stain. I rubbed it onto the finish and buffed it off with a soft cloth. I rubbed down the briar with Before & After Restoration Balm. I worked it into the nooks and crannies of the sandblast finish to clean, enliven and protect the new finish. It also evened out the stain coat and gave the stain a dimensional feel. I let the balm sit for a little wall and then buffed it with a horsehair shoe brush. I buffed the bowl with a cotton cloth to raise the shine. Once again I have gotten so used to Jeff cleaning the pipes before I got them I just I realized that I had not worked on the internals of the pipe. I looked down the shank and it was filthy as was to be expected. Arghhh. Went back to clean out the shank and airway in the stem and shank. I scraped the hardened tars on the walls of the mortise with a pen knife. I cleaned the mortise and the airway in the shank with pipe cleaners, cotton swabs and alcohol until it was clean. I painted the surface of the stem with the flame of a Bic lighter to lift the tooth dents in the underside of the stem. It took a few swaths of the lighter and the dents lifted. There was only one small pin prick left next to the button that would need to be repaired. I repaired the remaining deep tooth marks on both sides of the stem with black super glue. Once it dried I sanded the surface of the stem with 220 grit sandpaper to smooth out the repaired tooth marks and chatter and removing the remnants of calcification and oxidation on the stem until the oxidation was removed.I polished the stem with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit micromesh sanding pads and dry sanding it with 3200-12000 grit pads. I rubbed the stem down with Obsidian Oil after each pad. I polished it further with Before & After Pipe Polish, using both the Fine and Extra Fine polishes to further protect and polish out the scratches. When I finished with those I gave it a final rub down with the oil and set it aside to dry. With the stem polished I put it back on the pipe and lightly buffed the bowl with Blue Diamond. I buffed the stem with a more aggressive buff of Blue Diamond. I gave the bowl several coats of Conservator’s Wax and the stem several coats of carnauba wax and buffed the pipe with a clean buffing pad to raise the shine. I hand buffed it with a microfiber cloth to deepen the shine. The pipe polished up pretty nicely. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. This is the fourth of Farida’s Dad’s pipes that I am restoring from his collection. I am looking forward to hearing what Farida thinks once she sees the finished pipe on the blog. I will be posting it on the rebornpipes store very soon. It should make a nice addition to your pipe rack if you have been looking for a reasonably priced Dunhill. When you add it to your collection you carry on the trust from her father. The dimensions are Length: 5 3/4 inches, Height: 1 1/2 inches, Outside diameter of the bowl: 1 1/2 inches, Chamber diameter: ¾ inches. Thanks for walking through the restoration with me as I worked over this estate Autograph. More of his pipes will follow including some Charatans and more Dunhills.

Restoring another of Barry’s Dad’s Pipes – a Comoy’s Grand Slam Pipe 202

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Blog by Steve Laug

Late in the summer of 2017 I received an email on rebornpipes blog from Barry in Portland, Oregon. He wanted to know if I would be interested in purchasing his father’s pipes. He wrote that his Dad was a gracious, dignified and dedicated father, businessman and community leader for many years in Fresno, California where he was raised. He acquired his pipes when he gave up smoking cigarettes in the 1960s. There wasn’t an ounce of pretense in the man and he smoked his pipes for pleasure and as a pass-time while reading, enjoying company or watching sports on TV. Barry and I corresponded back and forth and concluded our deal. I became the proud owner of his Dad’s pipes. The inventory of the pipes he would be sending included some real beauties – Comoy’s, Parkers, Dunhills and some no name brands. They were beautiful and I could not wait to see them. I had him send them to Jeff where he would clean them up before I received them. Jeff took some photos of the lot as he opened the box. Each pipe was individually wrapped with bubble wrap and taped to protect them. There were 25 bubble wrapped packages and a lot of pipe accessories included – pipe racks, reamers, scrapers and Comoy’s filters and washers. There were pipe pouches and a wooden cigar box that held all of the accessories and reamers. There was a boxed KleenReem pipe reamer that was virtually unused. Jeff unwrapped the pipes and took pictures of the estate showing both the pipes and the accessories. Barry had labeled each pipe with a sticky note. It was an amazing addition to my pipe and tool collection. The next pipe I chose to work on from the collection was a Comoy’s Grand Slam Pipe, one of four Comoy’s pipes. It was also was missing the original stem but the shape of the bowl and shank were elegant. The shape was a classic Yachtsman or Zulu. The bottom of the shank was flattened and the pipe could stand on the desktop. The finish was dirty and filled with the detritus of years of use followed by sitting unused. The bowl was thickly caked and had an overflow of lava on the rim top. Even through the grime and grit you can still see the amazing birdseye on the sides and cross grain on the front and back of the bowl and the top and underside of the shank. Once more the presence of the replacement stem told me that the pipe had been a favourite and that the original stem had been either gnawed or broken and replaced. The new stem was well made and fit the shank perfectly. The pipe repairman had done a great job on the stem. I also had some use and was lightly oxidized and had tooth chatter and marks on both sides of the stem at the button. The surface edges of the button also had tooth marks that were present. This stem also had some calcification around the button as well that made me think that perhaps the stem had once sported a softee bit. Jeff took photos of the pipe before he cleaned it up. The photos tell the story better than my words can. He took some close up photos of the bowl and rim top to show the cake and their condition. He also took photos to show the grain on the side, front and underside of the bowl. He also photographed the stamping on both sides of the shank to show what it read and the condition of the stamping. The left side is stamped Comoy’s over Grand Slam over Pipe. On the right side it is stamped with the Comoy’s Com stamp Made in London in a circle over England. Next to that is the shape number 202. There is no patent number on the shank and the markings of the leather washer size *5 on the underside of the shank at the shank/stem union. The replacement stem was oxidized as mentioned above and had tooth chatter and marks. Jeff took photos of both sides of the stem to capture their condition before he cleaned the pipe.I wanted to learn a bit more about the Grand Slam line. The pipe had originally come with a special stinger/filter apparatus screwed into the tenon. I found the following photos and info on the pipephil website. I include both the link and the following photos for your information. http://www.pipephil.eu/logos/en/infos/comoy1.html The next photo shows the original metal filter system that was made to force “the air stream through a go-between space before entering the stem and the smokers mouth.” The stem that I have does not have the threaded tenon and thus cannot hold the apparatus. The photos below show the stem and the diagram of the system.I also wanted to have some idea of the date on this old pipe so I did a bit of digging on Pipedia. I found a helpful dating guide there. I found that the Comoy’s Grand Slam stamp on the shank dated it to the 1950s. At that time there were four variants to the stamping.

A simple block-letter style without serifs but with the C larger than the other letters and the apostrophe before the “S”.
A return to the slightly more fancy block letters with serifs and the apostrophe. (It seems that some grades carried different stamps, or at least that the stamping changed in different years for some grades.)
A simple block-letter style without serifs and without the apostrophe and with the “C” the same size as the rest of the letters. This stamp was probably not used very long.
A simple block-letter style without serifs but with the apostrophe before the “S” and with the “C” the same size as the rest of the letters.

Variant number 4 fits the style of stamping on this pipe. It is stamped with capital letters, block style without serifs and having an apostrophe between the Y and the S of Comoy’s. That helped me identify the pipe as coming from the 1950s.

The COM stamp (Country of Manufacture) is like the one in the picture to the left. The picture shows exactly what is stamped on the shank of this pipe. It is stamped in a circle with “MADE” at the top, “IN” in the middle, and “LONDON” at the bottom, with “ENGLAND” in a straight line beneath. According to the Pipedia article it can be assumed that this stamp was first used in the export drive in the early 1950s. Here is the link to the article: https://pipedia.org/wiki/Comoy%27s_Dating_Guide

Jeff did his usual stellar clean up job on the pipe leaving it pristine and without damage to the finish. He reamed the bowl with a PipNet pipe reamer and cleaned up the remnants with the Savinelli Fitsall Pipe Knife. He scrubbed out the mortise and the airway in the shank and the stem with alcohol, cotton swabs and pipe cleaners. He scrubbed the exterior of the bowl, rim and shank with a tooth brush and Murphy’s Oil Soap to remove the grime of the smooth finish on the bowl and shank. He rinsed it under running water. He dried it off with a soft cloth. Once the dust and debris were removed the finish looked very good. I took photos of the pipe to show its condition before I started my work on it. I took some close up photos of the bowl and rim top as well as both sides of the stem to show their condition. The bowl was very clean and the rim top looked good other thank some light nicks and darkening. He had been able to remove the lava from the finish. The inner edge was in excellent condition and there was some slight roughness on the outer edge. The stem is lightly oxidized as can be seen in the photos and has small tooth marks near the button on both sides.I started with the stem on this one. I “painted” the tooth marks with the flame of a Bic lighter and was able raise most of them even with the surface of the stem. I used some clear super glue to fill in the tooth mark on the top of the button that did not rise with the heat. Once the glue dried I sanded out the tooth chatter and the tooth marks next to the button on both sides and the repair on the top of the button with 220 grit sandpaper. I polished stem with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12000 grit pads. I wiped the stem down with Obsidian Oil after each pad. I polished it with Before & After Pipe Stem Polish, both Fine and Extra Fine. I gave it a final coat of Obsidian Oil and set it aside to dry. I worked on the darkened rim and the small marks and nicks on it with micromesh sanding pads. I lightly sanded it first with 220 grit sandpaper and followed it up with 1500-12000 grit micromesh sanding pads. I wiped it down after each pad to check on the progress. I worked Before & After Restoration Balm deep into the briar on the smooth finish to clean, enliven and protect it. I wiped it off with a soft cloth. I buffed the bowl with a cotton cloth to polish it. It really began to have a deep shine in the briar. I took some photos of the bowl at this point to mark the progress in the restoration. The grain on the bowl is really beginning to stand out and will only do so more as the pipe is waxed. I put the stem back on the bowl and worked the pipe over on the buffing wheel using Blue Diamond to polish the stem. I buffed the bowl and the stem with Blue Diamond polish to raise the shine on the briar and the vulcanite. I was careful to not buff the stamping and damage it. I gave the bowl and stem multiple coats of carnauba wax. I buffed the entire pipe with a clean buffing pad to raise the shine. I hand buffed it with a microfiber cloth to deepen the shine. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. The rich brown stain allows the grain to really stand out on this little pipe and it works well with the rich black of the polished vulcanite stem. This Comoy’s Grand Slam is a beautiful and interesting looking pipe. The dimensions of the pipe are: Length: 5 1/2 inches, Height: 1 3/4 inches, Outside Diameter: 1 1/8 inches, Diameter of the chamber: 3/4 inches. This 1950s era Comoy’s is one that will fit well in any pipeman’s collection and add a touch of real class. Thanks for walking through the restoration with me.

Resuscitating a Gentle Giant Bent Billiard

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Blog by Steve Laug

Several weeks ago I got a Facetime call from my brother Jeff. He was in Bozeman, Montana at an antique shop and had found a pipe that intrigued him. The seller wanted $49 for it and it was a large chunk of briar, well carved with a horn stem. He showed me photos on Facetime and it was indeed intriguing. It had gentle curves both from the bend of the shank to the curve of the horn stem. The horn stem appeared to be in good condition overall. The button and slot were damaged but it would not take too much work to clean up the slot and the nicks at stem/shank junction. We decided to pick it up and restore it. I have to tell you I had no idea how big the pipe was.Jeff took some photos of the pipe before he cleaned it up. It was in pretty good condition. The bowl had a light cake but there was no lava overflow on the rim top. The varnish finish on the bowl was peeling and spotty. The grain on the sides of the pipe was really nice. There were a lot of fills on the bottom and back sides of the bowl and all along the sides of the shank. On the underside of the shank and on part of the bottom of the bowl there were some very large fills that were chipped and damaged.The next series of photos show the rim top and the sides and bottom of the bowl. The cake in the bowl is not thick. The rim top is clean and there are fills that are chipped and nicked on the flat surface. The grain on bowl sides is really quite nice. The photo below of the bottom of the bowl and shank show the damaged fills. They are quite long and extend all along the shank bottom. The second and third photos below show the damaged areas of the fills. The fit of the stem to the shank was snug. There were a couple small nicks in the horn stem.The slot in the button end was damaged. On the top and the bottom edges the horn was missing. The second photo gives perspective on the damage along the edges of the button. The good thing was that the button itself was quite deep and I would be able to “top” it and remove much of the damage to the end. Jeff did his usual great job cleaning the pipe before he sent it to me. He reamed the bowl with a Savinelli Fitsall Pipe Knife. He scrubbed out the mortise and the airway in the shank and the stem with alcohol, cotton swabs and pipe cleaners. He scrubbed the exterior of the bowl, rim and shank with a tooth brush and Murphy’s Oil Soap to remove the peeling varnish coat on the bowl and shank. He rinsed it under running water. He dried it off with a soft cloth. Once the peeling varnish debris was removed, the finish was in decent condition. When it arrived it was in a vinyl bag that had been made for it. I had no idea how large the pipe was. I slowly took it out of the bag and took photos of the pipe to show its condition before I started my work on it.It was large enough that I can honestly say I have never seen a pipe this large. To get a better idea of the size I measured it for myself. The dimensions were Length: 12 inches, Height: 3 ½ inches, Outside Diameter of the Bowl: 2 inches, Diameter of the Chamber: 1 ½ inches. Later I will take a photo of the pipe with a regular sized bent billiard. I took some photos of the pipe to show what he had done in the cleanup work. It was a beautiful pipe. I took a close up photo of the rim and bowl to show the condition after the cleanup. You can see the fills on the top and inner edge of the bowl as well as the damage on the front inner edge. The stem itself looks to be in great condition other than several chips around the end next to the shank and the damage to the slot in the button.I took close up photos of the slot in the button to show the damage. In the photos you can see the damage to the edges of the slot on the sides and the top and bottom.Because of the depth of the button, the thickness of the stem end I decided to start on that first. I used the topping board and 220 grit sandpaper and topped the end of the button to remove the damaged areas as much as possible.I filled in the notches in the slot with clear super glue. I worked on them to repair the damages in those areas. I sanded the end of the button and slot to remove the excess and used a needle file to clean up the slot edges.I blew air through the stem and found that the flow was constricted. I pushed a pipe cleaner into the airway from both end and found that it hit a clogged or constriction at the midpoint of the stem. I pushed a flexible wire through the airway and pushed out thick tars and hardened oils from the stem. I used long churchwarden pipe cleaners dipped in alcohol through the airway to clean out the debris. Once I had cleaned it out the flow of air through the stem both ways was unrestricted.I repaired the chipped areas on the tenon end of the stem with clear super glue. Once the glue had cured I sanded the repaired areas to remove the excess and blend it into the surface of the horn. I polished the stem with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12000 grit pads. I wiped the stem down with Obsidian Oil after each pad. I polished it with Before & After Pipe Polish and rubbed it down with a cotton pad to deeply polish the horn. I set the stem aside and worked on the bowl. I decided to top the bowl to remove the damaged areas from the surface and edges of the rim. I used 220 grit sandpaper to clean it up. I topped it until the rim top was clean.I repaired the fills in the briar with clear super glue. I filled them until they were slightly over filled so that as the glue cured it would not shrink and require a second coat.When the glue dried I sanded the bowl with 220 and 380 grit sandpaper to blend the fills into the surface of the briar. I wiped the sanded briar down with alcohol on a cotton pad. I sanded the bowl with a medium and a fine grit sanding sponge and then stained it with a dark brown stain. I flamed it and repeated the process until the coverage was even. You might wonder why I stained it with such a dark stain… my reason was quite simple. I wanted to mask the fills – particularly the large ones on the underside of the shank. I set the bowl aside to let the stain dry and called it a night. In the morning I wiped it down with alcohol on cotton pads to make the dark brown stain more transparent and allow the grain to pop through the finish. The fills though still present were in better condition and less obvious. I polished the briar with micromesh sanding pads – dry sanding with 1500-12000 grit pads. I wiped the bowl down with an alcohol dampened cotton pad after each grit of micromesh. I put the polished stem back on the shank and took a photo of the pipe next to a Peterson’s London Made Kapruf 9BC to give an idea of the sheer size of this giant pipe. The Peterson is an average sized pipe and it appears almost like a nosewarmer next to this big one.I took the pipe to the buffer and worked it over on the buffing wheel using Blue Diamond to polish it. I buffed the entire pipe to raise the gloss on the briar and really bring shine to the horn. I gave the bowl and stem multiple coats of Carnauba Wax. I buffed the entire pipe with a clean buffing pad to raise the shine. I hand buffed it with a microfiber cloth to deepen the shine. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. The dark brown stains on the bowl do not hide the grain and the fills though present do not stand out as much. The bowl and the rich striated colours of the horn work really well to create a rich looking pipe. The pipe is so big that I want to once again give you the dimensions; Length: 12 inches, Height: 3 ½ inches, Outside Diameter of the Bowl: 2 inches, Diameter of the Chamber: 1 ½ inches. This humongous briar and horn stem pipe is truly a beauty. I have never seen a pipe this big before and it makes me wonder if it was not originally made as a display pipe. I don’t think I will ever know for sure but I do know that it was smoked and it is available to anyone who is interested in adding big pipe to their own collection. I would have said rack but it is too big to fit even a large rack. I will be putting it on the rebornpipes store shortly so if you are interested let me know. Thanks for walking through the restoration with me.

Restoring Barry’s Dad’s Patent Era Dunhill Shell Bulldog

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Blog by Steve Laug

Late in the summer of 2017 I received an email on rebornpipes blog from Barry in Portland, Oregon. He wanted to know if I would be interested in purchasing his father’s pipes. He wrote that his Dad was a gracious, dignified and dedicated father, businessman and community leader for many years in Fresno, California where he was raised. He acquired his pipes when he gave up smoking cigarettes in the 1960s. There wasn’t an ounce of pretense in the man and he smoked his pipes for pleasure and as a pass-time while reading, enjoying company or watching sports on TV. Barry and I corresponded back and forth and concluded our deal. I became the proud owner of his Dad’s pipes. The inventory of the pipes he would be sending included some real beauties – Comoy’s, Parkers, Dunhills and some no name brands. They were beautiful and I could not wait to see them. I had him send them to Jeff where he would clean them up before I received them. Jeff took some photos of the lot as he opened the box. Each pipe was individually wrapped with bubble wrap and taped to protect them. There were 25 bubble wrapped packages and a lot of pipe accessories included – pipe racks, reamers, scrapers and Comoy’s filters and washers. There were pipe pouches and a wooden cigar box that held all of the accessories and reamers. There was a boxed KleenReem pipe reamer that was virtually unused. Jeff unwrapped the pipes and took pictures of the estate showing both the pipes and the accessories. Barry had labeled each pipe with a sticky note. It was an amazing addition to my pipe and tool collection. The first pipe I chose to work on from the collection was a small Dunhill Shell Patent Straight Bulldog. It was missing the original stem but the sandblast on the bowl and shank was deep and tactile. The shape was a classic straight Bulldog that was elegant and graceful. The bottom of the shank had been flattened making it a sitter. The sandblast was dirty and filled with the detritus of years of use followed by sitting. The bowl was thickly caked and had an overflow of lava on the rim top. Even through the grime and grit you can see that this was a beautiful pipe. The replacement stem told me that the pipe had been a favourite and that the original stem had been either gnawed or broken and replaced. The new stem had some use and was both oxidized and had tooth chatter and marks on both sides of the stem at the button. The surface edges of the button also had tooth marks that were present. There as some calcification around the button as well that made me think that perhaps the stem had once sported a softee bit. Jeff took photos of the pipe before he cleaned it up. The photos tell the story better than my words can. He took some close up photos of the bowl and rim top to show the cake and their condition. He also photographed the stamping on the underside of the shank to show what it read and the condition of the stamping. The first one shows the words Dunhill Shell and next to that Made in England. Under that it reads Patent No. 417574¹⁹. I would need to look that up to date the pipe but the patent number told me that it was made prior to 1954 which was the last year the patent number was stamped on the shank. The second photo shows the shape number of the pipe and the size – 48/4. The shape number 48 designates a straight shank Bulldog with a diamond shank. The /4 is the group size of the pipe which to my mind is strange as the pipe is small. (https://rebornpipes.com/2012/11/01/dunhill-pipe-shapes-collated-by-eric-w-boehm/)The replacement stem was oxidized as mentioned above and had tooth chatter and marks. Jeff took photos of both sides of the stem to capture their condition before he cleaned the pipe. Jeff did his usual stellar clean up job on the pipe leaving it pristine and without damage to the finish. He reamed the bowl with a PipNet pipe reamer and cleaned up the remnants with the Savinelli Fitsall Pipe Knife. He scrubbed out the mortise and the airway in the shank and the stem with alcohol, cotton swabs and pipe cleaners. He scrubbed the exterior of the bowl, rim and shank with a tooth brush and Murphy’s Oil Soap to remove the dust in the sandblast on the bowl and shank. He rinsed it under running water. He dried it off with a soft cloth. Once the dust and debris were removed the finish looked very good. I took photos of the pipe to show its condition before I started my work on it. I took some close up photos of the bowl and rim top as well as both sides of the stem to show their condition. The bowl was very clean and the rim top looked good. He had been able to remove the lava from the finish. The inner edge was in excellent condition and the roughness of the outer edge in the early pictures above actually blended into the sandblast finish of the bowl. The stem is lightly oxidized as can be seen in the photos and has small tooth marks near the button on both sides.Before I did and restoration work on the bowl or stem I decided to pin down the date a bit more. I knew that it was pre-1954 but I wanted to narrow that down more. One of the beauties of Dunhill pipes is that the stamping can give you a precise date of manufacture. In this case I wanted to work on the stamping Dunhill Shell Made in England over Patent No. 417574¹⁹. I looked up the brand on the Pipephil website as he has very helpful photos and information in dating and interpreting the stamping on Dunhill pipes. On one of the supplemental pages associated with Dunhill pipes he has a page on the Patent era pipes. I find that this page is particularly helpful when I am trying to properly identify a pipe. Here is the link to the page: http://www.pipephil.eu/logos/en/dunhill/patent2.html#shell417574.

I looked under the section on Patent Shell pipes as that is what I had in hand. I found a photo of a pipe from 1937 that was stamped in the same manner as the one that I was working on. I took a screen capture of the photo and the information. The shape number 60/3 is in the same style and location as the 48/4 on my Dunhill. The Patent Number is identical to the number on my Dunhill. The suffix though in the same location and stamped in the same manner is different from mine. This one is the suffix ¹⁷ while mine is the suffix ¹⁹. The helpful part in the photo is the formula for determining the date from the suffix shown in the photo. In essence you add the date of the first patent 1920 to the suffix number and you arrive at the date. In my case Patent No. 417574(without “…/34) + suffix ¹⁹ = 1920+19 makes this a 1939 pipe. The next photo includes both the screen capture and the underside of the shank of the Bulldog I am working on.I started with the stem on this one. I sanded out the tooth chatter and the tooth marks next to the button on both sides with 220 grit sandpaper.I polished stem with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12000 grit pads. I wiped the stem down with Obsidian Oil after each pad. I polished it with Before & After Pipe Stem Polish, both Fine and Extra Fine. I gave it a final coat of Obsidian Oil and set it aside to dry. I worked Before & After Restoration Balm deep into the nooks and crannies of the sandblast finish to clean, enliven and protect the briar. I hand rubbed it with my fingers and worked it into the finish with a horsehair shoe brush. I wiped it off with a soft cloth. I buffed the bowl with a cotton cloth to polish it. It really began to have a deep shine in the briar. I took some photos of the bowl at this point to mark the progress in the restoration. The deep grooves in the sandblast and the rugged look gave the pipe a very gnarly feel in the hand. The mix of black and dark brown stain worked well with the sandblast finish. I put the stem back on the bowl and worked the pipe over on the buffing wheel using Blue Diamond to polish the stem. I buffed the bowl with a light touch so as not to get any of the buffing compounds in nooks and crannies of the sandblast. I buffed the stem to raise the gloss on the vulcanite. I gave the bowl multiple coats of Conservator’s Wax and gave the stem multiple coats of carnauba wax. I buffed the entire pipe with a clean buffing pad to raise the shine. I hand buffed it with a microfiber cloth to deepen the shine. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. The black and brown stains on the sandblast Dunhill Shell works well with the rich black of the polished vulcanite stem. This little Patent Shell is a beautiful and interesting looking pipe. The dimensions of the pipe are: Length: 5 inches, Height: 1 5/8 inches, Outside Diameter: 1 1/8 inches, Diameter of the chamber: 5/8 inches. This 1939 Dunhill is one that I am going to put in my own rack while I look for an original stem. Thanks for walking through the restoration with me.

Chasing the Grain and Restoring a Ben Wade by Preben Holm, Part 2

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Blog by Robert M. Boughton
With special thanks for the contributions of Lon “Pipe Lon” Schwartz
Copyright © Reborn Pipes and the Author except as cited

His hands are miracles. I can watch them for hours, transforming wood into something it never dreamed of being. *
— Katja Millay, in The Sea of Tranquility (2012)

INTRODUCTION

Happenstance often plays a major part in major historical, cultural and business changes. A 25-year-old American named Lon Schwartz, who owned a shop called Pipe Lon on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, was in Copenhagen, Denmark pursuing a rather nebulous search for “distinctive” pipes. Coming upon a certain provision store, Lon went inside and saw 18 pipes fashioned in the newly exploding freehand style. The young pipe entrepreneur, who now lives in Florida and still puffs on cigars, knew at once that he wanted all of them and more. Lon’s warm and generous insights made this blog possible.

“I never saw anything like them,” Lon told me. “I was in the right place at the right time.”

More accurately, as Preben Holm, who had carved the pipes and was 18 at the time and off performing his mandatory military service, which lasts from four to 12 months, Lon was in the right place at almost the right time. Upon the awaited arrival, Lon met the teenage pipe crafter and was so impressed with the youthful artisan’s work that he repeated his offer to buy all 18 pipes in stock and added that he would like as many more as Holm could produce. Persistence and determination to make the deal inspired the independent pipe distributor during that frigid winter to visit the Danish capital three times, staying in a small, uncomfortable room when he wasn’t prowling the city for pipes. One of Copenhagen’s stronger beers helped Lon sleep.

“One or two Carlsberg Elephant Beers, and you’d be out,” Lon said, remembering the 12% ABV content. Apparently, the alcohol level has been reduced to 7.2% in the intervening 53 years.

Popular with tourists from around the U.S. and elsewhere, St. Thomas was an outstanding starting point for the sale of such unusual pipes exclusively by Pipe Lon, the shop’s name from its beginning in the early 1960s until Lon’s retirement in 1986.

“I sold millions of pipes and had the largest open display of pipes in the world, about 300 feet of them,” Lon said. Now, for those who are not sports-oriented, that’s the length of a football field, or a 100-yard dash in track and field.

“I had the Virgin Islands rights to all of the brands that were big in the U.S. and Europe,” Lon added. “They included English makers like Charatan, Barling, GBD and Comoy; some French brands, and Danish names such as Criswell and Stanwell.”

Lon pointed out that most people still don’t know where the U.S. Virgin Islands are, and I will hazard a guess that the same folks would not imagine any one of the three main islands – St. Croix, St. John and St. Thomas – and about 15 minor islands is big enough to hold a football stadium.

Lon’s chance encounter brought about the ensuing wild success of freehand pipes, by Holm and others, in the U.S. One word I came across in several sources described the resulting introduction to the U.S. market as hype, which translates in the best sense to hoopla, a term I’m sure Holm would have embraced.

Holm wrote of the experience: “I could simply not have had any better starting point, because the taste changes quite a lot from one place in the U.S.A. to another, but here came, as mentioned, pipe-smokers from all the States. It was wonderful to feel how something one enjoyed making really was accepted.”

That was a tremendous understatement. By the 1970s, every major Danish pipe maker and more were engaged in business in the U.S. and many on an international basis.

If anyone deserves the esteemed if a tad cliché designation of late great artist, as I have called him before in this forum, it is Holm (1947-1989). Then again, the best clichés are truths propagated across generations within cultures. Holm dedicated almost the entirety of his all too brief 42 years to the practice and innovation of pipe craftsmanship, his most outstanding accomplishment. His vocation pushed those wild vertical and horizontal lines as far as he could during the short time he spent in this dimension; his legacy is the part he played in advancing the style that was called “Unfinished” by Sixten Ivarsson and other names by different early artists. Now this wonder of woodwork and engineering is known throughout the pipe world as the Danish freehand.

Poul Winslow, another master freehand carver, cut his teeth in pipe making starting when he was 16 and began training under Holm. Winslow had this to say about his early mentor: “Preben was a genius. Maybe a bit wild, always flying from idea to idea and impatient for results. But could he turn a pipe! Some of the most extreme freehands came out of our workshop in the ’70s, and whatever his critics say, they sold like crazy, mostly in America. And when it came to finishing, he was the best in the business.”Many old-schoolers throughout the pipe world, in Denmark and everywhere else, considered the “crazy” shapes offensive. “They thought these wild new pipes were funny, or stupid,” Lon said. “It took some time to realize their potential, artistically and financially.”

Maybe if I had been a codger in the 1960s I would have agreed, but as a child then I had already learned to deal with stranger things: Flower Children in their VW Love Vans, Hasbro’s Twister and the Slinky, for example (which was, in fact, introduced in 1945). Later, as a young man, I added news of the soiled clothes saved by a certain White House intern to the list.

A series of autobiographical articles by Holm, written from 1983-1984, was published later online and in The Pipe Smoker’s Ephemeris magazine (TPSE). The first article concerns Holm’s earlier years and offers fascinating details of the young boy’s immersion into his father’s large provision shop in Copenhagen, the capitol of Denmark and one of the world’s cultural hubs. Then there are the blank spots, like spaces in the New York Times daily crossword, that can tell still more about the man Some can be penciled in with tentative answers to erase and correct from clues provided later in the disjointed narrative; others are enigmatic, parts of tight knots jumbled in Down and Across clusters of cross-questions within questions.

Tom Dunn’s founding of The Universal Coterie of Pipe Smokers (T.U.C.O.P.S.) in 1964, at the time a rag-tag group of pipers held together by Dunn’s untiring work in his Queens, New York apartment, led in short order to TPSE. As becomes the fate of many pipers, Dunn’s life was plagued by avid collections of books and pipes. As many, but not all, of the books no doubt concerned pipes, the dual diagnosis would seem to be Book and Pipe Acquisition Disorder (BPAD) and its fraternal twin, Pipe Book Acquisition Disorder (PBAD), or just BPBAD. Hardbound editions of every TPSE issue from the magazine’s inception in 1964 as an irregular quarterly through 2004 were published by T.U.C.O.P.S./TPSE. Book Two [1994, pp 670-673] contains the article relied upon most for this part of the essay and was cited by Pipedia in its re-print of the text that I found.

Mindful that, as an autobiographical work, the series called “The Story of My Firm” is written from Holm’s perspective, I took his suggestion that he was behind the transition of old Danish designs into the revolutionary freehand technique with a reporter’s mandatory skepticism, no matter how much I would like to believe. Here is the passage I didn’t wish to question but had to do so, describing Holm’s life when he was 18 or 19 – in the late-1960s.

“One day while making the rather traditional hand-carved pipes as we had to in order to come by some money, I took a fancy to make something completely untraditional at that time. From the very beginning I had only worked with the finest Bruyere that could be provided, and on the whole it all had very pretty grain patterns, and that gave me the idea to try something novel. Contrary to what was done so far I started to form some of the pipes according to the grain pattern, and out of this I got some quite particular models…I began also to let the raw bark-top be part of the design.”

Considerable research now under the bridge, I found numerous sites suggesting earlier origins of the style, but they were all vague and inconclusive. Lon confirmed my suspicion that Holm, despite his great achievements as a carver, was not the father of the freehand.

“There were people playing around with new shapes and using the bark in the 1940s and ’50s, before it really got going in the ’60s” Lon said. Sixten Ivarsson (1910-2001), “the grand old man of Danish pipe making, was just one of these chasers, but many cite him as the rightful patriarch of the now large family. The truth may never be known, but Ivarsson started repairing pipes after the end of World War II and was soon asked to make them. The results that at first followed the classic English shapes evolved into variations that were sleeker and curvier, and eventually freeform.

CHILDHOOD’S COST

Holm’s account of his childhood working in his father’s provision shop is conflicted, to say the least, and offers no truly personal insights into the man whatsoever. As an adult, the son gives alternate descriptions of his father as “somewhat mean” and “altogether a very wise man.” There are other signs that the boy might have been confused by what he saw as contradictory strictures of his father’s. For example, Holm’s father forbade the smoking of cigarettes but was not opposed when the boy took to pipes around the age of 13-14. And in at least the first installment of the series of articles he later wrote, there is the absence of a single mention of the elder Holm’s given name or having a mother much less any other family. Lon filled in some of the family gaps as well.

“Preben’s mother sewed the pipe pouches, and he had a brother he didn’t talk about,” Lon said. Holm also had a wife, still alive in Denmark, from whom he was divorced. “We were very close also. She came to the Virgin Islands with him. He was a very odd person, a bit disturbed, and he let all of it out in his pipe making.”

Any concrete conclusions from these signs, however tempting to wade into, I will leave to psychologists. Furthermore, the overall nature of his youth, other than being a bit precocious with adult duties and interests, may have been more a product of his generation and culture than an outright unpleasant upbringing.

At any rate, the store had three departments – wine; magazines, cigarettes and other convenience items, and the part of the shop that in a short time drew young Preben into its irresistible mysteries, the pipe and tobacco department. Best of all, the tobacco shop included a small repair service area that Preben soon took over.

Holm’s prodigious start and rapid rise in his father’s family business

Starting as an errand boy when he was 12-13, Holm possessed a pragmatic maturity which led him to the early conclusion that his wage was “a sixth of what I could earn somewhere else, but [continuing with my father], I think, was very sound.” That young Preben already was considering his advancement options seems clear. Even as a youngster, Holm saved the tips he made running about town, depositing them in the bank and using his meager wages to purchase fine tobacco that was much more expensive than the lesser Danish blends at the time available at his father’s shop and most other places. Although at first his father thought this practice “crazy,” so charismatic and business-like was his son, and one can only imagine just as persuasive the samples of superior tobacco mixes provided to the elder Holm by the boy, that the master of the shop was won over and began offering a wide selection of foreign pipe tobacco. Most of the higher quality blends were English, meaning made in England.

Even before he was put in charge of pipe and tobacco purchases when he was only 14, Holm writes, he had a large role and the adult demeanor to fill it. “Most likely I was not always popular with the sellers of pipes who considered me too critical, but I thought that necessary in order to live up to the confidence our customers of pipes gradually placed in me.”

In most cultures, the notion of a child manufacturing tobacco pipes would be frowned upon. Not so in Denmark, where a cursory survey of the Who’s Who of that craft reveals many such examples. At the age of 15 in Holm’s case, his obsession with pipes had grown so overwhelming that he became fascinated with “an elderly gentleman, who himself made hand-carved pipes.” The unidentified man visited the shop to sell them and ended up offering to help young Preben obtain the machines he would need. Holm’s hard-earned savings of 1,400 kroners (USD231.00 today) proved to be enough, again with the guidance of the gentleman, who also supplied other tools. [I can’t find a handy inflation calculator for Denmark prior to 1981. Perhaps someone could give me an educated conversion for kroners to kroners starting earlier.]

With the equipment installed in a Spartan 13.5 square foot room in the basement, Holm began experimenting late into the nights – after the demanding work of his day job. But the daily practice paid off, and just short of his 16^th birthday, Holm handed over his first batch of pipes he deemed acceptable for sale in the shop. Without delay, the confident boy decided it was time to tackle the biggest seller in Copenhagen, Pipe Dan, who offered to buy 20-30 pipes every week. The most Holm ever earned from Pipe Dan, which was quite a bit, was 500kr, or USD83.00 today, for one exceptional pipe – an elaborate freehand. Holm suspected Pipe Dan didn’t believe the lad could pull it off when he described his plan and made the deal.

Before the end of his partnership with Pipe Dan, Holm and one “journeyman” were able to produce 50-60 pipes per week that the venerable middleman sold. Holm was one of the most promising pipe crafters to produce the freehand style. Of still more significance, however, is that he was the crafter responsible for the spread of the new form’s popularity to the U.S. and elsewhere.

Before Holm’s 22^nd birthday in 1969, he and his 45 employees at the time were outproducing the sales he and Lon could handle, and the two concluded something needed to change. The choice of a distribution outfit called Snug Harbour in New York had mixed results, to be nice. Although sales increased, Holm ended up never seeing much of the money due to the distributor’s eventual failure to pay its bills. Holm had a hefty supply of pipes ready for export and nobody to move them.

GOING DANISH WITH LANE LTD.

“I set up a meeting with Holm and Herman Lane in New York where I was present,” Lon said. “Lane and I were very close friends.” That turning point was in February 1971.

Herman G. Lane was the enormous ego behind Lane Ltd., a continuation of the original pipe and tobacco interest opened in Dresden, Germany in 1890 by Herman’s grandfather and resurrected in Manhattan by the emigrant grandson in 1938. The Lane Ltd. empire distributed some of the world’s foremost pipe brands, including Dunhill, Charatan and for a while Dr. Grabow, as well as many more, and had made Captain Black tobacco since the family business first opened in Germany.

To say the least, the chance to “team” with the pipe giant was an opportunity for young Holm that he could not have been expected to let slip away. For the ambitious Lane, on the other hand, the talented but not very business savvy Dane was an easy conquest. In raising the price of Holm’s pipes higher than they already were, Lane’s goal, of course, was to make money. That the two did, leading to the aforementioned hoopla.

THE BEN WADE CONNECTION

Lane was only interested in Holm’s freehands, and there was one snag to overcome: Snug Harbour retained a stockpile of Holm’s pipes and could be expected to sell them at cut-rate prices. To avoid this contingency, Lane and Holm made an exclusive rights deal for distribution of the freehand pipes and agreed the use of Holm’s name was inadvisable. As Lane Ltd. owned the Ben Wade name, Herman Lane suggested marketing Holm’s Golden Walnut Hand Made in Denmark line under that brand. One fine example of Holm’s traditional Danish pipes is the following example.Pipedia notes that “Within a very short time Ben Wade Handmade Denmark sold in much larger quantities and at higher prices than they had ever dreamed of.”

Advertisements hiked the prices well higher than Holm’s pipes ever sold for before, and one key campaign was a New York Times full-page spot for an elegant Seven-Day’s Set. The set, no surprise, is now difficult to find.

When I began work on these two blogs, I expected to accomplish the task in a single essay. Becoming bogged down by the complexity of pulling together so much information and realizing the result was becoming massive even by my wildest discourses, I knew I had to do a two-parter.

This installment started as the re-stemming of the first Danish freehand I bought for a pittance on eBay, in January 2015, as a sort of New Year’s excuse to make another P.A.D. gift to myself. Besides, it was a Buy Now deal for no more than $25 with shipping included, and no other watchers seemed to know it was something special. I wrote the original “Grooming a Ben Wade Golden Walnut Freehand” blog in 2015 because, until then, I never received an estate pipe from that online source that was anywhere close to being ready to smoke. The clean-up, in my mind, would be easy, just sanitizing the insides, removing a few petty scratches and deciding what to do with the rough rim and shank opening that were coated black, a condition I pretty much disliked. I modify the fact that the pipe was the first I bought, as I already had a couple of other freehands, as noted in Part 1.

In hindsight, I recognize how, in the easier process of cleaning the freehand, I preserved what I now consider to be an unpleasant though common black finish for the natural, radiant, lighter golden hue of the walnut that was, furthermore, left with what I considered an inappropriate dark brown finish. And so, instead of the sole re-stemming idea, I found myself with the option of removing the black stain where it was added and lightening the original dark brown stain on the rest as well as the minuscule scratches. Even though I intended the pipe for my own personal use, I had a compulsion to do the job as I would for sale to a customer.

RESTORATION

After choosing the full refurbish course, I began with the replacement of the original Vulcanite bit that had broken during a harried move using my car. The photos below show the bit as it was before I smoothed it out when I first bought the pipe.Here’s a similar new Lucite bit as it came in the mail, showing the huge 9mm tenon that was almost the same diameter as the one I used.If I owned a proper, electric stem turner, the job of fitting the tenon of the fancy Lucite bit to the shank opening would have been easy. But I had the pleasure of doing it by hand, and after previous experiments I didn’t want to mess it up with a single miscalculated stroke of a file. That left the sandpaper method. And now the fancy replacement, after hours of going over with 150-grit paper and smoothing with a steady, ascending progression, ready to heat in the oven for about 20 minutes at 210° F., and again after bending. I micro meshed the stummel, other than the rim, from 1500-12000.I was ready to soak the stummel in isopropyl alcohol. Micro meshing again, the wood was nice and smooth, and the rim and shank opening only needed some work with the 180-grit side of a sanding pad.Reaming and sanding the chamber from 150-600-grit paper, that part looked much better.Just for good measure, I retorted the pipe, and the result was magnificent.Having re-thought my initial desire to lighten the wood, I used red and brown Tripoli and several coats of carnauba in the buffing. CONCLUSION

Wanting more than anything else to get an idea of what Holm was like as a person, I put the question to Lon. His answer came back with almost no delay.

“Preben once bought a 1960s Chevy Camaro – a muscle car – for about $3,000.” After a pause, Lon finished. “He shipped it back to Denmark. It cost him crazy money, at least $100,000, to do this, but that’s how he was: a rock star. He was the only person in Denmark with that kind of car!”

Perhaps because I am a recovered alcoholic with 30 years of sobriety, something in the pervasive silence concerning the cause of Holm’s early death made me suspect that alcohol was involved. Looking at various photos of Holm, I couldn’t help noting the sadness of his face and eyes. At last, I found a single comment in a thread about Holm’s Ben Wade pipes on a popular smoker’s forum that read in part, “Preben literally drank himself to death…after his wife bolted with the kids.”

And so, again, but with difficulty, I turned for an answer to the man who might have been the best friend Holm ever had. There was a long pause before Lon replied.

“When he was very strong working, making crazy money from his pipes, he was drinking a lot, as a youngster will, with everything that goes with that,” Lon said with great care and delicacy. I didn’t ask him to expand on the last part. “He was a rock star! He didn’t know what to do with that. He was getting everything he wanted and was bored.”

We both fell silent for a moment before Lon concluded, “I think we’ve said everything that needs to be said about that.”

I agree.

My hope is that this two-part essay will inspire future pipe makers, hobbyists and artisans alike to take up Chasing the Grain. I, for one, intend to try my hand and imagination at the noble goal, even if the results are less than spectacular.

I want to express my deep gratitude to Lon, a consummate gentleman, for his invaluable help filling in details of Preben Holm’s life, craft and various business adventures. Lon was unstinting in taking the time to share his reminiscences, not one but three times. The only protest I have is that Lon ignored my repeated requests for a photo of himself of his choosing. That’s why I was forced to track down, with great difficulty, the one I used. So, Lon, don’t blame me if you don’t like it!

Lon also opened up about himself. Born in 1940 in New York and now retired as a pipe buyer and seller, Lon described himself as the only child of highly educated parents who considered him “an idiot” because of his dyslexia.

“That was my motivation to leave home when I was 17 and look for work in the city,” Lon said in a matter-of-fact tone.

The uncontrollable condition, which causes written letters to become jumbled beyond sense, places Lon in the company of such historical and cultural figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Tom Cruise, Walt Disney – and even at least three U.S. presidents: George Washington, John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush.

The idea horrifies me, the more so because, when I was a child, I suffered from another optic disorder that mimicked dyslexia but proved curable. I’ll never forget the shame of not being able to read or write until I turned 10 and moved to Shaker Heights, Ohio, where I was blessed to meet a woman who loved children and teaching more than anything else. Sonia Golden was an innovator in special education and knew how to do her job when my so-called teachers in California had dismissed me as “borderline retarded.”

On his own in the Big Apple, Lon started out as a sales clerk for Wally Frank, earning $37.50/week. That’s $321.63 in today’s dollars – not bad for a start, but a long way from the ultimate success he had after discovering Holm, for all intents and purposes, first partnering with the brilliant pipe maker and later, as a friend, guiding him to bigger distributors.

The shop known as Pipe Lon was only for a relatively short time, but the quality pipes he sold there can still be found online. Lon told me he was in the habit of stamping various pipes he sold, whether they also bore the makers’ marks or not, with the following nomenclature. In some cases, only the best guesswork can predict the actual craftsman.* The opening quote strikes me as an elegant example of the habit of personifying wood that I discussed in Part 1.

SOURCES

https://www.cia.gov/library/Publications/the-world-factbook/geos/vq.html
https://www.google.com/search?q=poul+winslow&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS769US769&oq=poul+winslow&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.17027j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
http://www.danishpipemakers.com/forside/2006/1update/sixten/sixten.html
https://www.finepipes.com/danish
https://pipedia.org/wiki/Holm,_Preben
http://www.scandpipes.com/info.asp?text=3
http://www.pipephil.eu/logos/en/logo-benwade.html
https://pipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Wade
https://pipedia.org/wiki/Lane,_Ltd.
http://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/05/business/business-people-lane-ltd-gets-outsider-lane-tobacco-maker-places-outsider-helm.html
https://trademarks.justia.com/722/75/snug-harbour-72275082.html
http://pipesmagazine.com/forums/topic/ben-wade-by-preben-holm
https://rebornpipes.com/2015/01/24/grooming-a-ben-wade-golden-walnut-danish-freehand/

Restoring the last of three Jobey Gourd Calabashes with a Briar Shank Extension

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Blog by Steve Laug

As I have mentioned before my brother Jeff has really gotten good at finding Gourd Calabash pipes when he is pipe hunting. He picked up this batch recently. I posted about the large calabash in the middle of the right hand column recently and it is available on the rebornpipes store. It is by far the largest of the five calabash pipes that he found. The second one I am working on is the pipe at the bottom right of the photo. It is another unique looking Calabash to me in that it is a nicely shaped gourd with a briar shank extension on the end of the gourd. It bears the Jobey brass oval logo on the side of the briar extension. The third of the calabash pipes that I worked on was a second Jobey calabash. It is the one on the bottom left of the photo below. As I mentioned before, when I first looked these Jobey calabashes I wondered if any of them had the Jobey system tenon that I have come to expect on Jobey pipes. However, this was not the case on any of the three Jobey Gourd Calabashes in the bunch. All of them have the mortise drilled in the briar extension and is made for a push stem. Once again, I had never seen Jobey Gourd Calabashes before learned that they were probably made by Wally Frank. Here is the link to the first of the pipes I worked on – the one circled in red in the photos below: https://rebornpipes.com/2018/01/09/restoring-a-full-bent-jobey-gourd-calabash-with-a-briar-shank-extension/. Here is the link to the second of the three circled in blue: https://rebornpipes.com/2018/01/28/restoring-the-second-of-three-jobey-gourd-calabashes-with-a-briar-shank-extension/. Today I am working on the third of the Jobey Calabash pipes and the fourth of the lot. It is the pipe on the top left of the photo below.

Once again Jeff took some photos of the pipe before he did his cleanup work on it. The photos below show it in the condition he found it in on one of his hunts. The gourd was dull looking and generally dirty. It had spots of sticky label material on the sides of the bowl. The briar shank extension was also dull and lifeless looking and there was a gummy substance in the brass logo on the shank extension. The meerschaum bowl on this pipe was light weight and appeared to be block meerschaum. There was a thick cake in the bowl and the rim had a coat of lava that went almost all the way around the inner edge of the chamber onto the rim top. The chair leg style stem was oxidized and dirty. There were tooth marks and tooth chatter on both sides of the stem at the button. The next photo shows the condition of the meerschaum cup. The cup of the meer was had some lava overflow from the bowl on the inner edge and top. There is also darkening around the inner edge of the bowl and cake in the bowl.The next two pictures show the condition of the underside of the bowl and the tars and oils on the walls of the gourd. The underside of the meerschaum cup was dirty but in good condition. The cork gasket on the inside edges of the gourd was in good condition but dried out. It needed some grease to liven it up.The briar shank extension was dirty and there was debris around the outside of the oval and in the letters stamped in the brass.The stem had light oxidation and tooth marks and chatter on both sides near the button. It also had the same price tag glue on the top and underside of the stem.Jeff did a thorough cleanup on the meerschaum bowl, the inside of the gourd and the stem. He carefully scraped the cake in the bowl with a Savinelli Fitsall Pipe Knife. He cleaned the internals with alcohol, pipe cleaners and cotton swabs – scrubbing out the mortise as it was dirty. He scrubbed the exterior of the meerschaum cup and the gourd with Murphy’s Oil soap and a tooth brush and was able to remove all of the oils and dust ground into the gourd. He was able to remove all of the lava and overflow from the top of the meerschaum bowl and left it looking very clean. Once he had removed the lava on the rim top and inner edge they were cleaner than I expected. The scratches in the meerschaum were quite shallow and would be easy to polish out. He cleaned internals of the stem with alcohol. When it arrived I took some photos of it to show how it looked before I did the restoration. He did a great job of cleaning up the rim top including the tars and lava. The bowl is clean and smooth with all cake removed. The photo below shows the condition of the bowl and rim at this point. The inner edge of the bowl is clean but there is some wear and damage to the edge. The stem had cleaned up nicely with relatively little oxidation. The tooth marks on the top and underside along with the chatter were still present.I took the bowl off the gourd to have a look at the inside of the pipe. The gourd was very clean. The cork gasket was dry but that could be remedied easily enough. The mottled appearance carried through to the inside of the meerschaum bowl and can be seen in the photos.I used my fingers to rub the gourd and briar extension down with Before & After Restoration Balm to bring life to both and to remove any residual dust or dirt in the surface of the calabash. I wiped it off with a cotton cloth and buffed it with a shoe brush. The next few photos show the gourd at this point in the process. I used some Vaseline petroleum jelly to lubricate the cork gasket and soften it. I have done this for years and I really like the effect of the jelly on the cork. I used 1500 grit micromesh sanded off the spots along the surface of the meerschaum cup where it sat against the cork and the top of the gourd to ensure a smooth fit.I checked the pliability of the cork gasket, rubbed a little more Vaseline into it and put the bowl back on the gourd. The fit of the cup against the gasket was snug but not hard to insert. It was perfect. The pipe was beginning to look finished. The shine on the gourd and the rim looked good. The briar extension had its own shine as well. I took the cup off the gourd and polished it with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 and dry sanding with 3200-12000 grit pads. I wiped the bowl down after each sanding pad with a damp cloth to remove the sanding dust. I buffed the cup with a microfiber cloth to polish it. I sanded the stem with 220 grit sandpaper to remove the tooth marks and chatter on the top and underside near the button. The rest of the stem was in decent condition. I rubbed the stem down with Obsidian Oil at this point and let it sit for a little while.I cleaned out the airway in the stem with pipe cleaners and alcohol to remove any residual bath and also the sanding dust from the work on the stem surface and tooth chatter.I polished the vulcanite stem with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12000 grit pads. I rubbed the stem down with Obsidian Oil between each sanding pad. After using the 12000 grit pad I buffed the stem with Blue Diamond to give a deep and rich shine. I polished the stem with Before & After Pipe Polish using both the fine and the extra fine product. I gave it a final coat of Obsidian Oil and set it aside to dry. Normally at this point I put the stem back on the bowl and take the pipe to the buffing wheel to work it over. This time I took the parts to the buffing wheel. I gently buffed the meerschaum cup and rim with Blue Diamond to lightly polish the meer. I carefully buffed the gourd base and briar shank extension with Blue Diamond being cautious about the pressure I put on the gourd. I buffed the stem with Blue Diamond to raise the gloss on the vulcanite. I took the pipe back to the work table and gave the gourd multiple coats of Conservator’s Wax. I gave the stem several coats carnauba wax. I buffed the parts of the pipe with a clean buffing pad to raise the shine. I hand buffed it with a microfiber cloth to deepen the shine. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. The dimensions of the pipe are, Length: 9 inches, Height: 3 ½ inches, Diameter of the cup: 2 ½ inches, Diameter of the chamber: 7/8 inches. I will be adding this one to the rebornpipes store shortly if you are interested in adding it to your collection. Thanks for looking.

Kathy’s Dad’s Pipes #7– Restemming &Restoring George Koch’s “Malaga” Canadian

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Blog by Steve Laug

This is the sixth of the “Malaga” pipes that I am working on from Kathy’s Dad’s pipes. For those of you who have not read the other blogs let me tell the story. Last fall I received a contact email on rebornpipes from Kathy asking if I would be interested in purchasing her late Father, George Koch’s estate pipes. He was a lover of “Malaga” pipes – all shapes and sizes and she wanted to move them out as she cleaned up the estate. We emailed back and forth and I had my brother Jeff follow up with her as he also lives in the US and would make it simpler to carry out this transaction. The long and short of it is that we purchased her Dad’s “Malaga” pipes. There are some beautiful pipes in that lot. I have never seen this many “Malagas” together in one place in all of my years of pipe restoring and refurbishing. They varied from having almost pristine to gnawed and damaged stems that will need to be replaced. Many of the pipes already had replacement stems or maybe George had the staff at the Malaga shop in Michigan put Lucite stems on them because he was such a gnawer. I don’t know if we will ever know the answer to that as Kathy did not know for sure. She did know though that he loved the brand and that most of the pipes he smoked he purchased from the shop. These were some well used and obviously well loved pipes. Cleaning and restoring them will be a tribute to this pipeman. (Here is a link to some history of the Malaga Brand if you are interested: https://rebornpipes.com/tag/malaga-pipes/. There are also links there to a catalogue and the maker George Khoubesser.) Knowing about the pipeman who held the pipes in trust before me gives another dimension to the restoration work. This is certainly true with this lot of pipes. I can almost imagine George picking out each pipe in his assortment at the Malaga shop in Michigan. I may well be alone in this, but when I know about the person it is almost as if he is with me work on his pipes. In this case Kathy sent us not only information but also a photo of her Dad enjoying his “Malagas”. Once again, I am including that information so you can know a bit about the pipeman who held these pipes in trust before they are passed on to some of you. I include part of Kathy’s correspondence with my brother as well…

Jeff…Here is a little about my dad, George P. Koch…I am sending a picture of him with a pipe also in a separate email.

Dad was born in 1926 and lived almost all his life in Springfield, Illinois. He was the youngest son of German immigrants and started grade school knowing no English. His father was a coal miner who died when Dad was about seven and his sixteen year old brother quit school to go to work to support the family. There was not much money, but that doesn’t ruin a good childhood, and dad had a good one, working many odd jobs, as a newspaper carrier, at a dairy, and at the newspaper printing press among others. He learned to fly even before he got his automobile driver’s license and carried his love of flying with him through life, recertifying his license in retirement and getting his instrumental license in his seventies and flying until he was grounded by the FAA in his early eighties due to their strict health requirements. (He was never happy with them about that.) He was in the Army Air Corps during World War II, trained to be a bomber, but the war ended before he was sent overseas. He ended service with them as a photographer and then earned his engineering degree from University of Illinois. He worked for Allis Chalmers manufacturing in Springfield until the early sixties, when he took a job at Massey Ferguson in Detroit, Michigan. We lived in Livonia, and that’s where his love for Malaga pipes began. After a few years he returned to Allis Chalmers and we moved back to Springfield. I remember that when we went back to Michigan to visit friends, Dad had to go to the Malaga store and acquire a few new pipes. Many a year I wrote to Malaga and they picked out a pipe for me to purchase that I could give Dad for a Christmas or birthday present. He was always pleased. His favorites were the straight stemmed medium sized bowl pipes, but he liked them all. He had some other pipes, but the Malagas were his favorites. I remember him smoking them sitting in his easy chair after work, with feet up on the ledge by the fire burning in the fireplace. Growing up it was my job to clean them and he liked the inner bowl and stem coated with Watkins vanilla, leaving a little of that liquid in the bowl to soak in when I put them back on the rack. Dad quit smoking later in life and so they’ve sat on the racks for many years unattended, a part of his area by his easy chair and fireplace. Dad passed when he was 89 years old and it finally is time for the pipes to move on. I’m very happy they are being restored by you and your brother and hope they find homes who enjoy them as much as Dad did. Thank-you for your care and interest. — Kathy, the oldest daughter

Kathy, once again I thank you for providing this beautiful tribute to your Dad. We will appreciate your trust in allowing us to clean and restore these pipes. I am also trusting that those of you who are reading this might carry on the legacy of her Dad’s pipes as they will be added to the rebornpipes store once they are finished.

The seventh of the pipes that I chose to work on is another “Malaga” Canadian. This one is a smooth pipe with a flat bottom so that it is a sitter. It had a chewed and ruined vulcanite stem. Some great grain peeks through the grime around the bowl. The warm brown finish on the bowl appeared to be good condition under the dust and tars of time. I am pretty certain that Malaga pipes must have been oil cured. The uniform finish and the light weight lead me to think that is the case. Once more there are no fills in the bowl or long shank. I have yet to find a fill in any of the bowls I have worked on in this lot and looking through what remains I think it is fair to say I won’t find any in them either.

The rim top on this Canadian was originally smooth and flat but it was covered with an overflow of lava from the thick cake in the bowl. The rim top at the back of the bowl was more thickly caked than the front. The rim top, along with the inner and outer edge of the bowl was heavily damaged. There were some nicks and rounding of the outer edge and there was some darkening on the inner edge. The bowl was out of round from previous reaming. The rim top and outer edge showed signs of being knocked against a hard surface to empty the dottle from the bowl. The stamping on the topside of the shank was clear and read “Malaga” and on the flat underside it read Imported Briar. There were no shape numbers on the pipe. The black Lucite stem was ruined with bite marks on the top and a long slice on the underside of the stem. It would need to be replaced. The interior of the pipe was dirty. I know that George thoroughly enjoyed his pipes as is evidenced by the wear that all of them show. Jeff took these photos before he started the cleanup work on the pipe. Jeff took close up photos of the bowl and rim to show the condition of the pipe before he started to work his magic on it. The exterior of the bowl and shank were dirty. You can see the lava on the rim top, the cake and remnants of tobacco in the bowl and the nicks on the rim top and bowl around the outer edge of the rim. The second rim top photo shows the damage on the front edge of the rim. It is dirty but in otherwise good condition. He also took photos of the sides and underside of the bowl and shank. He also took a photo of both sides of the shank to show the stamping on both the topside and the underside. You can see the overall condition of the shank before cleanup.The next photo shows the fit of the stem against the shank. The stem was obviously a replacement and was poorly fit. The second and third photo shows the damage to both surfaces of the stem near the button, the worn and chewed down button and the missing underside of the stem. The stem is a write off – misshapen and ruined.Working on this seventh pipe followed pretty much the same pattern as all of these pipes. Jeff had reamed the bowl with a PipNet pipe reamer and followed up with a Savinelli Fitsall pipe knife to remove the cake. He scrubbed out the mortise and the airway in the shank and the stem with alcohol, cotton swabs and pipe cleaners. He scrubbed the exterior of the bowl, rim, shank and stem with a tooth brush and Murphy’s Oil Soap to remove the oils and tars on the bowl, rim and shank. He rinsed it under running water. He dried it off with a soft cloth. The lava mess on the rim was thoroughly removed without harming the finish underneath it. The slight bevel to the rim was visible once the pipe was clean. Without the grime the finish looked really good. As noted above the stem was a write off and would need to be replaced with a suitable one. I took photos of the pipe to show its condition before I started my work on it. I took a photo of the rim top to show the condition it was in after the cleanup. Jeff was able to remove all of the lava on the rim top and edges. There is still some darkening on the rim top. You can see the damage on the top itself and around the outer edges from knocking out the pipe on a hard surface. The inner edge of the bowl had a lot of nicks and cuts and was out of round. The stem was clean and you can see the tooth chatter and marks on the surface near the button and the large deeper tooth mark on the underside.I went through my can of extra stems and found one that was suitable for a replacement on this Canadian. It was the same shape and size as the replacement that had been chewed through. Once it was cleaned up it would work nicely. The tenon was the right size which was a bonus. I put the stem on the shank and took the following photos. This is the part of restemming that is always a challenge. Like the sixth pipe I finished a bit ago it needed to be shaped. The new oval stem is always slightly off because the shank is never truly oval or round. Either the shank needs to be taken down slightly to accommodate the fit of the new stem or the stem needs to be taken down to meet the shank. In this case you can see from the following photos that the stem was a poor fit on the sides while the top and the underside of the shank were very close. In the photo of the top side you can see that it is slightly smaller. That tells you that the shank is not perfectly oval and adjustments will need to be made.I sanded off all of the calcification on both sides of the stem with 220 grit sandpaper and cleaned up the area around the button edge. I sanded the surface of the button to reshape it on both the top and underside.I decided to work over the rim top next. I topped the bowl to remove the damaged areas on the top of the rim and minimize the damage to the inner and outer edges. Once that was finished there was still some damage to the rim from previous reaming and lighting. I took care of it by reshaping the bevel and the inner and outer edge of the rim with 220 grit sandpaper. I was able to remove all of the damage to the rim surface and reshape both then inner and outer edge of the rim. The gentle bevel that was originally present was restored. With the rim reshaped I turned my attention to fitting the stem to the shank. I carefully sanded the shank to reduce the diameter to match the stem. It was interesting that most of the work had to be done on the sides of the shank with a little on the top and bottom. In essence I made the shank more oval to match the stem. The photos below show the fit of the new stem at this point. I sanded the rim top repairs and the stem/shank junction with a medium and a fine grit sanding sponge to make sure that the scratching was reduces but more importantly that the transition at the shank and stem was smooth and flowing. It is easy to create issues with a folded piece of sandpaper (in terms of dips in the briar or vulcanite) because the two mediums have different hardness. The sanding sponge minimizes that for me. I polished the briar with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12000 grit pads. I wiped the briar down after each pad with a damp cloth to remove the sanding dust. I rubbed the bowl down with Before & After Restoration Balm to deep clean the briar and particularly the reshaped areas. The product works to clean, enliven and protect the briar. I hand rubbed it with my fingers and wiped it off with a soft cloth. I buffed the bowl with a horsehair shoe brush to polish it. The briar really began to have a rich shine. I took some photos of the bowl at this point to mark the progress in the restoration. I cleaned out the stem with alcohol, pipe cleaners and cotton swabs. It took a bit of scrubbing but before too long the airway was clean.I polished the stem with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12000 grit pads. I wiped the stem down after each pad with a damp cloth to remove the sanding dust. I used the Before & After Pipe Polish to remove the small minute scratches left in the brass and the vulcanite. I finished by wiping the stem down with a final coat of Obsidian Oil and set it aside to dry. I the polished stem and bowl with Blue Diamond to polish out the remaining small scratches. I gave the bowl multiple coats of Conservator’s Wax and the stem several coats of carnauba wax and buffed the pipe with a clean buffing pad to raise the shine. I hand buffed it with a microfiber cloth to deepen the shine. The pipe polished up pretty nicely. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. This is the seventh of the many “Malaga” pipes that I am restoring from Kathy’s Dad’s collection. I am looking forward once again to hearing what Kathy thinks once she sees the finished pipe on the blog. I will be posting it on the rebornpipes store very soon. It should make a nice addition to the next pipeman’s rack and in purchasing it you can carry on the trust from her father. The dimensions are Length: 6 inches, Height: 1 3/4 inches, Outside diameter of the bowl: 1 1/4 inches, Chamber diameter: 3/4 inches. Thanks for walking through the restoration with me as I worked over this Malaga from George’s estate. More will follow in a variety of shapes and sizes.

Kathy’s Dad’s Pipes #6– Restemming &Restoring George Koch’s “Malaga” Carved Canadian

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Blog by Steve Laug

This is the sixth of the “Malaga” pipes that I am working on from Kathy’s Dad’s pipes. For those of you who have not read the other blogs let me tell the story. Last fall I received a contact email on rebornpipes from Kathy asking if I would be interested in purchasing her late Father, George Koch’s estate pipes. He was a lover of “Malaga” pipes – all shapes and sizes and she wanted to move them out as she cleaned up the estate. We emailed back and forth and I had my brother Jeff follow up with her as he also lives in the US and would make it simpler to carry out this transaction. The long and short of it is that we purchased her Dad’s “Malaga” pipes. There are some beautiful pipes in that lot. I have never seen this many “Malagas” together in one place in all of my years of pipe restoring and refurbishing. They varied from having almost pristine to gnawed and damaged stems that will need to be replaced. Many of the pipes already had replacement stems or maybe George had the staff at the Malaga shop in Michigan put Lucite stems on them because he was such a gnawer. I don’t know if we will ever know the answer to that as Kathy did not know for sure. She did know though that he loved the brand and that most of the pipes he smoked he purchased from the shop. These were some well used and obviously well loved pipes. Cleaning and restoring them will be a tribute to this pipeman. (Here is a link to some history of the Malaga Brand if you are interested: https://rebornpipes.com/tag/malaga-pipes/. There are also links there to a catalogue and the maker George Khoubesser.)Knowing about the pipeman who held the pipes in trust before me gives another dimension to the restoration work. This is certainly true with this lot of pipes. I can almost imagine George picking out each pipe in his assortment at the Malaga shop in Michigan. I may well be alone in this, but when I know about the person it is almost as if he is with me work on his pipes. In this case Kathy sent us not only information but also a photo of her Dad enjoying his “Malagas”. Once again, I am including that information so you can know a bit about the pipeman who held these pipes in trust before they are passed on to some of you. I include part of Kathy’s correspondence with my brother as well…

Jeff…Here is a little about my dad, George P. Koch…I am sending a picture of him with a pipe also in a separate email.

The sixth of the pipes that I chose to work on is a “Malaga” Carved Canadian with some different rustication. There are trails around the pipe and the top of the shank is rusticated in an unusual and interesting pattern. It had a chewed and ruined vulcanite stem. Some great grain peeks through the grime between the trails carved around the bowl. The warm brown finish on the bowl appeared to be good condition under the dust and tars of time. I am pretty certain that Malaga pipes must have been oil cured. The uniform finish and the light weight lead me to think that is the case. Once more there are no fills in the bowl or long shank. I have yet to find a fill in any of the bowls I have worked on in this lot and looking through what remains I think it is fair to say I won’t find any in them either.

The rim top on this Canadian was lightly beveled inward and was covered with an overflow of lava from the thick cake in the bowl. The bevel was almost invisible. The rim top at the back of the bowl was more thickly caked than the front. The rim top along with the inner and outer edge of the bowl was damaged. There were some nicks on the outer edge and there was some darkening on the inner edge. The bowl was out of round from previous reaming. The rim top and outer edge showed signs of being knocked against a hard surface to empty the dottle from the bowl. The stamping on the underside of the shank was clear and read “Malaga” near the stem/shank junction. There were no shape numbers on the pipe. The black vulcanite stem was ruined with bite marks on the top and a major portion of the underside of the stem missing. It would need to be replaced. The interior of the pipe was dirty. I know that George thoroughly enjoyed his pipes as is evidenced by the wear that all of them show. Jeff took these photos before he started the cleanup work on the pipe. Jeff took close up photos of the bowl and rim to show the condition of the pipe before he started to work his magic on it. The exterior of the bowl and shank were dirty. You can see the lava on the rim top, the cake in the bowl and the nicks on the rim top and bowl around the outer edge of the rim. It is dirty but in otherwise good condition. He also took a photo of the sides and underside of the bowl and shank. He also took a photo of both sides of the shank to show the rustication pattern on the topside and the stamping on the underside. You can see the overall condition of the shank before cleanup.The next photo shows the damage to both surfaces of the stem near the button, the worn and chewed down button and the missing underside of the stem. The stem is a write off – misshapen and ruined.Working on this sixth pipe followed pretty much the same pattern as all of these pipes. Jeff had reamed the bowl with a PipNet pipe reamer and followed up with a Savinelli Fitsall pipe knife to remove the cake. He scrubbed out the mortise and the airway in the shank and the stem with alcohol, cotton swabs and pipe cleaners. He scrubbed the exterior of the bowl, rim, shank and stem with a tooth brush and Murphy’s Oil Soap to remove the oils and tars on the bowl, rim and shank. He rinsed it under running water. He dried it off with a soft cloth. The lava mess on the rim was thoroughly removed without harming the finish underneath it. The slight bevel to the rim was visible once the pipe was clean. Without the grime the finish looked really good. As noted above the stem was a write off and would need to be replaced with a suitable one. I took photos of the pipe to show its condition before I started my work on it. I took a photo of the rim top to show the condition it was in after the cleanup. Jeff was able to remove all of the lava on the rim top and edges. There is still some darkening on the rim top. You can see the damage on the top itself and around the outer edges from knocking out the pipe on a hard surface. The inner edge of the bowl had a lot of nicks and cuts and was out of round. The stem was clean and you can see the tooth chatter and marks on the surface near the button and the large deeper tooth mark on the underside.I went through my can of extra stems and found one that was suitable for a replacement on this Canadian. It was the same shape and size as the replacement that had been chewed through. Once it was cleaned up it would work nicely. The tenon was the right size which was a bonus. I put the stem on the shank and took the following photos. This is the part of restemming that is always a challenge. The new stem is always slightly off because the shank is never truly oval or round. Either the shank needs to be taken down slightly to accommodate the fit of the new stem or the stem needs to be taken down to meet the shank. In this case you can see from the following photos that the stem fit the underside of the shank perfectly. In the photo of the top side you can see that it is slightly smaller. That tells you that the shank is not perfectly oval and adjustments will need to be made.I sanded off all of the calcification on both sides of the stem with 220 grit sandpaper and cleaned up the area around the button edge. I sanded the surface of the button to reshape it on both the top and underside.I decided to work over the rim top, reshaping the bevel and the inner and outer edge of the rim with 220 grit sandpaper. I was able to remove all of the damage to the rim surface and reshape the inner edge of the rim. The rounded flowing bevel that was originally present was restored.With the rim reshaped I turned my attention to fitting the stem to the shank. I carefully sanded the shank to reduce the diameter to match the stem. It was interesting that most of the work had to be done on the sides of the shank with a little on the top and bottom. In essence I made the shank more oval to match the stem. The photos below show the fit of the new stem at this point. I polished the briar with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12000 grit pads. I wiped the briar down after each pad with a damp cloth to remove the sanding dust. I rubbed the bowl down with Before & After Restoration Balm to deep clean the nooks and crannies of the rustication paths and patches as well as the smooth areas. The product works to clean, enliven and protect the briar. I hand rubbed it with my fingers and wiped it off with a soft cloth. I buffed the bowl with a horsehair shoe brush to polish it. The briar really began to have a rich shine. I took some photos of the bowl at this point to mark the progress in the restoration. I cleaned out the stem with alcohol, pipe cleaners and cotton swabs. It took a bit of scrubbing but before too long the airway was clean.I polished the stem with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12000 grit pads. I wiped the stem down after each pad with a damp cloth to remove the sanding dust. I used the Before & After Pipe Polish to remove the small minute scratches left in the brass and the vulcanite. I finished by wiping the stem down with a final coat of Obsidian Oil and set it aside to dry. I the polished stem and bowl with Blue Diamond to polish out the remaining small scratches. I gave the bowl multiple coats of Conservator’s Wax and the stem several coats of carnauba wax and buffed the pipe with a clean buffing pad to raise the shine. I hand buffed it with a microfiber cloth to deepen the shine. The pipe polished up pretty nicely. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. This is the sixth of the many “Malaga” pipes that I am restoring from Kathy’s Dad’s collection. I am looking forward once again to hearing what Kathy thinks once she sees the finished pipe on the blog. I will be posting it on the rebornpipes store very soon. It should make a nice addition to the next pipeman’s rack and in purchasing it you can carry on the trust from her father. The dimensions are Length: 6 inches, Height: 1 7/8 inches, Outside diameter of the bowl: 1 3/8 inches, Chamber diameter: 3/4 inches. Thanks for walking through the restoration with me as I worked over this Malaga from George’s estate. More will follow in a variety of shapes and sizes.