Tag Archives: Hilson Double Ecume Sandblast pipes

Restoring my Paris Finds – A Pair of Hilson Double Ecume Sandblast Pipes

Blog by Steve Laug

As I wrote earlier in another blog, I found these two pipes on an evening walk to dinner in the Latin Quarter of Paris (https://rebornpipes.com/2016/06/10/some-good-pipe-finds-on-a-recent-work-trip-to-europe/). The pair of Hilson pipes was stamped in block letters Hilson over Double Ecume with the word Sandblast following. The delicate canted Dublin was stamped with the shape number 5 just before the stem shank union, while the stack with the saddle stem was stamped with the shape number 95/S on the bottom of the bowl. The finish on both pipes was dirty and worn but not ruined. The bowls were meerlined and the top of the Dublin had a heavy build up of tars and cake that overflowed the bowl. The stack/billiard was less dirty but the cake overflowed onto the rim as well. The meer lining was darkened. The bowl in the Dublin had a thick cake that extended to the bottom of the bowl and reduced the size of the already petite bowl. The bowl on the stack was less thick but it nonetheless reduced the diameter of the bowl as well. The stems on both pipes had some tooth chatter and light oxidation but would easily clean up. Both stems bore a stylized capital H on the left side. As I looked at them I was glad I had picked them up for small sum of 10 Euros or slightly over 14 dollars Canadian.

I remember when I purchased them I took them back to the hotel in Paris and used a wooden coffee stirrer to scrape away some of the cake and debris in the bowls to check the meerlinings. I was hoping that they were intact all the way to the bottom of the bowl. I breathed a sigh of relief when I found that they were uncracked as far as I could see.

I was curious as to the stamping on the pipes. I have cleaned and restored quite a few Hilson pipes over the years – many of them meerschaum lined – and I do not recall seeing the Double Ecume stamping before. First I wanted to know what the name Ecume meant so I looked it up in a French/English dictionary and found that it meant Foam. Thus the pipe name was Hilson Double Foam. I liked the French far better! It sounded more elegant. I used Google and found out that the pipes were made when Hilson was still a Belgian Company. This dates them as pre 1980 as the company was then purchased by Gubbels in Holland. I checked on Pipedia and found an advertisement for Hilson Elan pipes. The sandblast looks like the one on my Ecume pipes. The interesting thing that came from this Wally Frank Catalogue advertisement was the description of the tube in the shank. It is described as Hilson’s special tubular dry smoking condenser. You can see a line drawing of that in the photo below marked as FIG. A (circled in red in the photo below).From that link I checked out Chris Keene’s Pipe pages site for more information and found the following catalogue page. http://pipepages.com/2wf14.htm. Even thought the advertising page is for Hilson Fantasia Pipes it confirmed several facts for me that I had not previously known. First was that the meerschaum lined bowl was cut from block meerschaum and not a pressed meerschaum. That is probably why it had survived intact through the years. Second, that all Hilson Belgian pipes had the condenser tube in the shank. I also found a page from an Iwan Ries Catalogue from 1962 that showed meerschaum lined briar pipes. Sadly I could not view the page as the link was not functional.I carefully reamed out the cake in both pipes with the Savinelli Pipe Knife to take it back to the meerschaum lining. I did not want to gouge or chip the meerlining so I proceeded with caution. I sanded the interior of the bowl with a piece of 229 grit sandpaper around the cutting head of the PipeNet pipe reaming tool to take out all of the cake in the bowls. Once I cleaned the bowls I decided to top the two pipes to remove the build up on the rim surfaces. Since both pipes appeared to have smooth rims topping them would not damage the original look of the pipe and would allow me to smooth out the top of the meerschaum bowl insert. I topped both bowls on 220 grit sandpaper on the topping board.When I finished topping them the meerschaum was clean the surface of the rim was smooth.I sanded the rims with 1500-2400 grit micromesh sanding pads to remove the scratches left behind by topping the bowls. The polished rims looked really smooth and ready to be stained. I stained the rim of the briar outer bowl with a dark brown stain pen and a Sharpie black permanent marking pen to get the dark brown colour of the bowl.I scrubbed out the inside of the stem and the shank of the pipes with alcohol, pipe cleaners and cotton swabs. There was a lot of grime in both pipes. The condenser tubes on both were coated with tars and oils that I removed with 0000 steel wool. I had to reshape the open end of the tube in the Dublin stem as someone had tried to remove it with pliers. It was crushed and there were some marks from the jaws of the pliers. I reshaped it with an ice pick inserted and heated the tube with a lighter. I was able to bring it back to round. I was also able with the heating to remove both tube inserts and clean the stems before putting them back in place. I scrubbed the briar with a tooth brush and Murphy’s Oil Soap and rinsed them with tap water. I dried them off and both bowls were clean.I sanded the tooth marks and chatter on the stems with 220 and 380 grit sandpaper and a medium grit sanding stick. I was able to remove all of the marks. I wet sanded the stems with 1500-2400 grit micromesh sanding pads and rubbed them down with Obsidian Oil. I dry sanded the stems with 3200-4000 grit pads and gave them another coat of oil. I finished sanding them with 6000-12000 grit pads and gave them a final coat of Obsidian Oil and let them dry. I buffed the stems with Blue Diamond on the wheel and gave them both multiple coats of carnauba wax. I hand waxed the bowls with Conservator’s Wax and a shoe brush. I hand buffed both the bowls and stems with a microfibre cloth to add depth to the shine. The finished pair of Hilsons is shown in the photos below. They are a beautiful set of pipes and serve as a reminder of my recent Paris trip. Thanks for looking.

Some Good Pipe Finds on a Recent Work Trip to Europe

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Blog by Steve Laug

I just can’t get around fitting in a pipe hunt on my trips. There is something intoxicating about hunting for old estate pipes in whatever city I am traveling to or visiting. When I am traveling in Europe for work it is a bit harder to have time to go pipe hunting but on the most recent trip to Paris, Berlin, Sofia and Athens I had a little time. In Paris the hunt was almost an accident. My colleague from work and I were walking in the Latin Quarter to meet some friends for a dinner at a Belgian Mussel’s Restaurant and I came across a fellow selling items on a table-cloth in a doorway. It was like the sidewalk sales that spring up here in Vancouver where a person put a table-cloth down and puts items for sale on it. I looked in an archway as we walked by and I happened to see a pipe on the cloth. I picked it up and it was a Hilson Double Ecume Sandblast Dublin 5. The stain was dark and the blast was deep and craggy. The stem was in great shape with the Hilson H stamp on it. It had minimal bite marks. As I looked at it I noticed that it was a meerlined bowl. I asked the seller what he wanted for it. He said he had another as well and pulled out a second Hilson Double Ecume Sandblast with a meerlined bowl. This one was a stack with a saddle stem stamped 95/S. It also had a nice sandblast. The stem was in better shape than the Dublin and also bore the Hilson H on the left side of the saddle.He said he would sell me both of the pipes for 10 Euros. I handed him the Euros and the deal was done.

The pair of pipes is shown in the next four photos below. They are in pretty nice shape and should clean up easily enough. I was pretty excited to have found this pair of pipe when I really was not hunting for them and figured I had my finds for the trip. I wrapped them and put them in my bag for safe keeping while I continued on my trip. I did not expect to have more time to go pipe hunting. But I would be proved wrong.

I left Paris for Berlin and had quite a few days of meetings with no time for pipe hunting. We left Berlin and flew to Sofia, Bulgaria. We were met by a colleague and her husband at the airport. After a quick trip to our hotel they took us for a walk about in the city centre. The two women went looking for gifts that my colleague wanted to bring home with her and the husband and I went pipe hunting. He is a newbie pipe restorer (I just posted his first blog on rebornpipes today – Dal Stanton). He took me to one of his haunts – an outside antique market in the shadow of Sofia’s largest church building – Nevski Cathedral. We visited the same vendor where he had purchased the Dr. Plumb Oom Paul he wrote about restoring (https://rebornpipes.com/2016/06/10/a-newbie-restore-of-a-dr-plumb-9456-oom-paul/). He asked the vendor to show us his pipes and after looking through them I picked out three.

The top pipe in the photo is stamped Primus over 2. It appears to be made of an alternative wood rather than briar and has a silver rim cover and windcap. It is missing a band that must have disappeared previously and the stem is an obvious replacement that is poorly fit to the shank. The second pipe I purchased from him was a bowl sans stem that is stamped Shell Pipe 141. The combination sandblast and rustication give the pipe a great look. I paid about 15 Lev or $11 Canadian for these two. We left behind a lot of pipes with cracked shanks and a bag of pipe bowls and assorted stems. Who knows maybe Dal will pick some of them up at a later date? We went on to another seller and I found a nice looking oval shank billiard that was stamped Alko Old Briar on top of the shank. It had an inner tube from the tenon extending into the bottom of the bowl. The briar had some nice grain and the finish, thought dirty was in decent shape. The stem was lightly oxidized with some tooth chatter but otherwise it was in decent shape. It looks like an older pipe by the shape of the stem and the button. This one cost me about 5 Lev or just over $3 Canadian. We wandered around the market and visited as we walked along. We went to another seller that Dal had bought things from in the past and I picked up a nice little straight sandblast saddle stem Dublin. The bowl had a nice blast that was lighter than the one on the pair of Hilson pipes from Paris but it was pleasing nonetheless. The finish was worn but redeemable and it was stamped on the underside of the shank HEIBE in an arch with the number 430 next to the shank/stem junction. The stem was lightly oxidized and had no tooth chatter on the surface. This one also cost me about 5 Lev or just over $3 Canadian. From the market we walked to a shop Dal called the hole in the wall – a place he had found some nice pipes in the past. We went through many of the pipes that vendor was selling and left them behind. Dal spoke to the vendor about some pipes that he had seen when he had been there previously and the man took out a pipe bag and opened it for us.Inside there were some beautiful pipes. We looked them over carefully– there was a bent sandblast Stanwell Vario, a Savinelli Tortuga, a Butz Choquin Rocamar and a bent Capitol Apple. All of these were in a pipe bag with a tamper and filters in the pouch. The seller was asking somewhere around 140 Lev or $102 Canadian for the four pipes and the bag. I bypassed them by Dal went back and picked them up the day I flew to Athens. I think he got a great deal on four beautiful pipes. When I got to Athens I did not have time to go pipe hunting. I did see some promising antique shops that will have to be checked out the next time I am there. It was a great trip with great meetings and people and it ended with me bringing home these six pipes. I am happy to have found them and had a great time in the process of hunting. Until I get to go back and do some more looking, I will have many fond memories of the trip and the hunts that will come to mind as I clean and restore these pipes.