Tag Archives: Mastercraft De Luxe Pipes

Refreshing a New Old Stock (NOS) Mastercraft De Luxe Chubby Billiard

Blog by Steve Laug

My brother found this pipe on one of his pipe hunts not long ago. It is a beautiful unsmoked, new old stock (NOS) chubby billiard. The briar is in great shape. The rim, the pristine bowl and the finish on the pipe all spoke of new pipe. I did a bit of reading on the brand to see if I could possibly date this pipe. I copied a section from Pipedia. It gives a flow of the history of the brand. Here is the link: https://pipedia.org/wiki/Mastercraft in it the text comes from a posting made by “Ted” on the Grabow Collectors Forum. He was the former Exec VP of Grabow/Mastercraft.

It doesn’t appear that Mastercraft was ever a manufacturer and bought pipes from multiple factories — mostly French and English. It survived briefly the post war recovery and then was acquired by Grabow. Ted writes:

“First a confession. From 1974 till 1984 I had several positions with Mastercraft including Executive Vice President. I also worked for Grabow from 66 till 74 and from 84 till I retired in 91. In 91, with retirement, I was President and COO for the corporation that was called “Sparta Industries”. I have seen both sides of the “fence”, and even though I never left the “employ” of Grabow, My loyalties for 10 years were with M/C.”

“United States Tobacco(UST)(Skoal and Copenhagen) bought Grabow in 69′ from the Lavietes family. In 74′ they bought M/C from Bernard Hochstein and moved it into the EXACT facility Grabow occupied. I was named “operations manager” and we were in the basement of a 4 story building in Sparta, NC.”

“M/C was STRICTLY an importer of pipes and pipe related merchandise. In 74′ when M/C moved from NYC to NC the inventory of finished goods was stored in a facility in Winston Salem, NC. Lentz Moving and Storage. Stacked 10 feet high the inventory covered 180,000 square feet….FINISHED. In my time at Grabow I had never seen that much finished stock, and the shapes, manufacturers,finishes. Heaven for a pipe smoker…..Damn right. You would have had to slap me really hard to get the grin off my face.”

“I’ll just list a few Manufacturers/names of the inventory. England:Parker/Hardcastle(Dunhill), Orlik…France: Jeantet…Jima…Cherrywoods. Italy: GIGI pipe…Radica….Rossi…Federico Rovera….Emilio Rovera….Santambrogio. Brebbia. Meerschaums from Austria: Strambach. Lighters from Japan….Pouches and accessories from Hong Kong…and the Israeli pipes from Mr. Hochstein’s sons. Trust me…This is only a small sample of the things M/C had, and bought into inventory.”

With that bit of history I know that the pipe was made prior to the buyout by Grabow in 1974. That makes the pipe at least 43 years old at this time. This one is French made probably by Jeantet. The stamping reads on the left: Mastercraft in the normal shield over De Luxe. The shield hangs from a branch like a sign. On the right side of the shank it is stamped Corsican Briar over France. I took a close up photo of the bowl and rim to show the unsmoked condition of it when I received it. The briar is quite beautiful though there are a few fills on the top and right side of the shank that are expertly blended into the finish. I also took a photo of the internals of the mortise and airway to show the raw briar that shines there.The stem showed signs of wear from sitting for the long years in a display case of cabinet. There were scratches, nicks and marks in the rubber that are shown in the photos below. There was a gummy substance from a label on the underside of the stem.The polished aluminum stinger apparatus in the tenon was unmarked and a shine of a new pipe.The finish on the pipe has a shiny topcoat of varnish. I took some photos of the stamping on the shank sides. The next two photos show what that looked like.I worked on the stem to polish out the scratches and nicks in the surface. I wet sanded it with 1500-2400 grit micromesh sanding pads and dry sanded it with 3200-12000 grit pads. I was able to polish out all of the nicks and scratches without resorting to more invasive methods. I buffed the stem with Blue Diamond on the buffing wheel to further polish out the scratches. I gave the stem multiple coats of carnauba wax and buffed it with a clean buffing pad to raise the shine back to the surface. I hand buffed it with a microfibre cloth to deepen the shine. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. It is a great piece of pipe history and one that will be available on the rebornpipes store soon. If you want to beat the traffic and add it to your collection just send me an email and it can be yours. Thanks for looking.

Breathing New Life into a Mastercraft De Luxe

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Blog by Steve Laug

Another one of the gift pipes that caught my eye was one stamped on the left side of the shank Mastercraft De Luxe in the shield like the one on the left. On the right side it is stamped Century Old Mediterranean Briar Israel. I have worked on quite a few Mastercraft pipes and know that the company never made pipes itself but had makers in Italy and other places make the pipes for them. I have written another blog on the lines within the Mastercraft hierarchy and know that the De Luxe was pretty high up the list of their pipes. Here is the link to the hierarchy blog https://rebornpipes.com/2014/06/23/a-mastercraft-pipe-lines-hierarchy/

When I took the pipe to the worktable my first impressions were that it was in pretty decent shape. But as I looked more closely I could see the issues that were there. The bowl had some fills in the surface on the front, left side and the underside of the shank that had shrunk and were pitted pink putty. The right side of the bowl had a deep scratch in the briar at a diagonal to the bowl that cut through the finish. The varnish coat that was on these older MC pipes was flaking around the damaged rim and around the pitted fills. The rim had some charring and darkening that would need to be addressed. When I took out the stem a previous owner had coated the entire tenon with very soft waxy substance that had gone rancid. It was all over the mortise and inside and outside of the tenon. It was thick and not easily removed. The stem was oxidized and the stamping on the side had been put on at an angle which meant that the whitening only was on one side of the MC oval. The aluminum band on the stem that fit against the end of the shank had marks on it like it had been turned with a pair pliers. It was more of a mess than first met the eye.

The next photo is a close-up of the rim to show some of the damage to the outer edge and the beveled top that would need to be addressed. This would be slightly more complicated than just topping the bowl and resurfacing things. I would have to hand sand the bevel and the edges to minimize the charring and the dents on the back outer edge. I would also need to work on the inner edge of the rim to bring it back into round condition. To facilitate the clean up on the rim I reamed the bowl back with the third cutting head of my PipNet reamer. The bowl is quite large with a diameter of 7/8 inches. I took the cake completely out of the bowl and took it back to bare wood in order to work on the inner edge of the rim. The next photo shows how the reaming with the cutting head smoothed out the surface of the inner rim considerably and made my work simpler. I decided to try to whiten the stamping on the stem (for a bit of a break from working on the bowl). I wanted to see if I could gain anything from the lighter stamping on the one side of the oval. I used a liquid white-out to fill the stamping and when it dried rubbed off the excess. It looked good initially but the stamping on the topside and the left leg and top of the M was too shallow to hold much of the whitener. I scrubbed out some of the mortise and airway in the stem with alcohol, cotton swabs and pipe cleaners to remove the rancid smelling waxy substance (the more I worked with the more it smelled and worked like lard). It took quite a bit of scrubbing to remove the thick coat of this substance. I then used a retort on the bowl and stem and boiled it out three times before I was greeted with clean alcohol. The first boil the alcohol came out black, the second time it came out amber and finally the third time it came out clean. I scrubbed out the airway and the shank a final time with the pipe cleaners and cotton swabs and the shank and stem were finally clean.

With the interior cleaned out it was time to work on the exterior of the bowl. I scrubbed the surface of the bowl with acetone on cotton pads to remove the varnish topcoat and the grime from the finish. Then I picked out the pink putty fills and replaced them with briar dust and super glue. I put a drop of glue in the pit, tamped in dust and then a bubble of glue on top of the patch. The next two photos show the patches after they had dried and before I sanded them.

I sanded the patches with 220 grit sandpaper and followed that with a medium and fine grit sanding sponge to blend it into the surface and remove the scratches. Strangely the briar dust and super glue patch did not turn black this time as I was counting on. It was almost tan coloured. I would have to use a black permanent marker to etch in lines to match the grain around the repair and then sand them lightly to blend them in. I also sanded the horizontal scratch on the right side of the bowl until it was smooth. When I had finished sanding I scrubbed the bowl another time with acetone on the cotton pads.

I sanded the bevel on the rim and the inner and outer edges of the rim with a folded piece of 220 grit sandpaper and then with the sanding sponges to minimize the damage and bring the bowl back into round. I wiped down the rim with the acetone to clean up the dust. I decided to stain the pipe with a dark brown aniline stain thinned 3:1 (3 parts stain to 1 part alcohol). I wanted the stain opaque enough to cover the fills and mask them so that they did not stand out but also did not totally hide the bird’s eye and cross cut grain on the shank and bowl. This mixture of stain worked well.

After I had flamed the stain to set it I rubbed the bowl and shank down with a coarse cotton cloth to blend the finish and hand buff it. I wanted to remove some of the opaqueness on the sides of the bowl and lighten the finish slightly. Once it was done I set the bowl on a cork to dry while I worked on the stem. I lightly sanded the stem with 220 grit sandpaper to remove the tooth chatter and some of the oxidation. I used the lighter to paint the flame across the surface of the stem to burn off the oxidation and also heat the tooth marks to lift them. I was able to raise all of the tooth marks using this method. The key is to keep the flame moving across the surface and to not stop in any one place too long. Once I had flamed the stem I wiped it down and sanded it with the medium and fine grit sanding sponges. I also sanded the aluminum ring to smooth out the damage on its surface and prepare it for polishing.

With the oxidation removed I sanded the stem with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12,000 grit pads. In between each set of three pads I rubbed the stem down with Obsidian Oil before moving on to the next set of pads. When I finished sanding with the 12,000 grit pad I rubbed it down a final time with the oil and when it dried put the stem on the pipe and took it to the buffer.

I buffed the pipe with White Diamond and gently buffed around the stamping on the shank and the stem. I gave it multiple coats of carnauba wax and buffed it with a soft flannel buff to raise the shine. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. The last two photos below show a close-up of the rim to show how the beveling and shaping worked to restore the look of the top of the pipe. It is ready to re-enter a life of usefulness for its next companion. It should be a great smoking pipe for whoever takes on the trust next.