Tag Archives: refinishing

Stealing a Huge Savinelli 515 KS Champagne Panel

Guest Blog by Robert M. Boughton
Member, North American Society of Pipe Collectors
http://www.naspc.org
http://www.roadrunnerpipes.com
http://about.me/boughtonrobert
Photos © the Author

“Cave ne venditor.”
“Let the seller beware.”
― From Latin, inspired by “Caveat emptor” – Let the buyer beware

INTRODUCTION
I might just as well have started this blog with former President Richard Nixon’s televised statement to 400 Associated Press editors on November 17, 1973, denying any involvement in the Watergate scandal: “Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.” He certainly did. But I thought the Latin reference was more appropriate to describe my fortunate acquisition of this unusual and magnificent example of a Savinelli panel pipe. After all, it’s not my fault the online seller probably thought he would get more for it. I suspect that in hindsight, he now wishes he had asked for a higher amount, perhaps as a “Buy Now” offer. I would have paid it, within reason. In fact, I went so far as to look for a charitable donation link to make up for some of the money I saved, but this seller didn’t have one.

The two aspects of this serendipitous acquisition that surprised me even more were that the other four bidders seemed not to recognize a fantastic bargain when it seemed to scream the fact at them, and that I lucked out in that no other serious collectors chanced upon the offer. The minimum asking price was $9.50. About 24 hours later, the first bidder appears to have made a max offer of $12.00 and for the moment had it for $10. Then the second entrant offered $14.50 because when I entered what I thought would be a sharply escalating war with my first $25 bid and two days left, a third-party had the beautiful pipe for $15. The second and third amateurs took the price up to $24.50 by the time I bumped my bid to $50 with 22 minutes remaining and my finger on a higher last-second bid should it have become necessary. It did not, and I won for a total of $29.45 with shipping. The vagaries of eBay bidding never cease to amaze me.

The Champagne, as with most varieties of the 515 KS shape, measures 6″ in length with a chamber diameter of ¾”x1″. The bowl is 5¼”x1¾”. The shank is a 2¼” square leading into the 2½” stem with a wide comfort bit. Check out these other versions. When the box arrived, somehow I managed to keep it unopened on the seat beside me until I reached my next destination, the best old-style tobacconist in these parts, where I almost have my own cushioned chair and a cot to sleep on in the back. Taking a seat in my favorite spot, with its view of the whole shop, I retrieved my knife from my pipe go-bag and slit through the packing tape, then peeled open the glued sides of the box. Here is what I was overjoyed to find inside.

THE RESTORATION
Disregarding the few minor detractions seen in some of the photos above (namely, the rim, chamber and stem), this was a restorer’s dream. The nomenclature was crystal clear through the oil and dirt of handling: Champagne on the left shank, the Savinelli shield and 515 KS above Italy on the left and Savinelli Product on the bottom. Even the full black outline of the crown was still on the stem.

And for the first time in my experience, the chamber was all that needed sanding, with 150-grit paper followed by 320. I put the stem in a water and OxiClean soak for a half-hour while I gave the bowl and shank a quick bath with purified water and a couple of small pieces of cotton cloth, and then prepared the rim with super fine steel wool and the chamber as described. Removing the stem from the wash, I ran a soft fluffy cleaner through the air hole, clearing out considerable grime. An initial concerted scrubbing of the rinsed and still wet outer stem with a soft meshed cotton rag followed by rubbing hard with a four-grade progression of micromesh from 1500-4000 removed all but a few pernicious patches of green. And so I replaced the stem in the OxiClean mix and gave it another hour. By then, a second fluffy cleaner came out almost clean, all discoloration was gone and the same micro-meshing left it ready for buffing.

I retorted the pipe with two Pyrex test tubes of boiled alcohol and eliminated the considerable smoke, carbon and other crud that had, over time, leached into the shank and bowl. A vigorous scrubbing of the inner shank with both ends of another fluffy cleaner pulled out the residual dark wet mess that remained after extraction from the briar; the same treatment of the chamber with hard, tight, squeaky turns of a final small piece of thin cotton cloth cleared the last bit of blackness there.

There were very fine scratches all around the panels of the pipe, but they were so minuscule that they all but vanished with steady, even, up-and-down strokes of 1500 and 3200 micromesh, and dissipated to a nice gloss with the final buffs of 3600 and 4000.

The final step of putting the stem to the wheels with white and red Tripoli and White diamond, clearing the excess and giving all of these a stronger grip with a gentle spin on an un-waxed buffing cloth, brought out a high, more durable sheen. The same approach, without the red Tripoli but adding two coats of carnauba, had the same effect on the briar.

The finishing touch was filling in the crown on the stem with a white china marker.

CONCLUSION
In my online pipe sales and service business, I have been successful in a steady upgrade of the brands and quality of products offered. I have listed and sold a number of pipes I dearly wanted to keep – including a smooth, old meerschaum bulldog with an excellent patina, a Comoy’s Satin Matte Christmas edition, a Jobey Fawn small apple, a WDC 14K band full bent smooth billiard and even a no-name Italian semi-rusticated full bent billiard that was exceptional in its resemblance to a Peterson full bent system pipe and was engineered as well as most of that brand’s models.

My struggle with the question of whether to add the newly restored Savinelli Champagne Panel to my private collection or offer it up for sale was the longest, most tortuous inner debate I have made due to my strong desire to add a Savinelli to the inventory, which I have in fact already done by sacrificing one of my old favorites, a Clark’s Favorite medium smooth churchwarden that sold immediately. But, as some might already have guessed, I succumbed to the more powerful voice urging me to keep this one. I know I can’t horde everything that comes my way, but I can select those that speak to me deeply and personally.

I have not even enjoyed the pipe yet, so recent was my decision not to let it go. That patience will almost certainly end today, and soon.

A Rebirth for a pair of Duncan Hill Aerosphere Pipes

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Blog by Steve Laug

The last pair of pipes needing refurbishing from my gift box was a pair of Duncan Hill Aerosphere pipes – one a smooth pot and the other a rusticated billiard. I have had quite a few Duncan Hill pipes over the years and sold some, restemmed others without the reverse tenon system and really never paid much attention to them. The pot was a nice piece of briar and actually quite clean. The finish was in good shape though dirty. The inserted reverse tenon was loose and would need to be repaired. The bowl was dirty and had some pieces of tobacco attached to the walls of the bowl. The rim was in great shape. The stem was oxidized and the round brass carburetor hole was plugged. There was minimal tooth chatter on the stem and no bite marks that would need to be repaired. The stamping was slightly worn in the middle but it still clearly read Aerosphere over Duncan Hill over Ltd. The rusticated billiard was also fairly clean though there was dried wax stuck in the grooves of the rustication. The rim top was quite dirty with tars and oils built up and filling in the rustication. The bowl had a light cake and tobacco leaf stuck on the bowl sides. The finish was workable but dirty. The stem was in better shape than the one on the pot. It was dirty and had sticky tape remnants on the top but there was little oxidation and no tooth chatter. The carburetor on this one was also clogged and the stem was loose on the reverse tenon. It was stamped with the same stamping as the smooth pot but on a smooth band on the bottom of the shank.

I removed the stems and put the bowls in my alcohol bath to soak for a while. While they were soaking I wanted to do a bit of research on the brand and see what I could discover about it. I was curious to look for patent information and old advertisements to see if I could discover the marketing schemes that made this quite a prolific seller over the years. I Googled Duncan Hill Aerosphere and the first bit I found was from a Google group for ASP. There I found the following quote. I have the reference link placed at the end of the quote if you want to follow up on the information: “The Duncan Hill Aerosphere smoking system (U.S. patent #4,275,747) utilizes the same principle of physics as the manometer. The Aerosphere, visible as the brass pin on the side of the mouthpiece, brings a scientifically measured amount of air into the stem with each puff. The control of the amount of air and the velocity of the air produces two effects that result in superior smoking pipe performance.” https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.smokers.pipes/GUxdN5Dus4Q

I also found a link to an advertisement for the brand featuring the designer in Popular Mechanics Magazine, February 1980, pg. 31 on Google books. Here is the link:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=m9UDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=Duncan+Hill+Aerosphere+Pipes&source=bl&ots=tR4egGI0ig&sig=XeACE0-Vh19-1JNcA0kAgS87kRI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=p1QbVbPTEpLvoATEpoLoCQ&ved=0CBwQ6AEwADgU#v=onepage&q=Duncan%20Hill%20Aerosphere%20Pipes&f=false Next is an advertisement from Popular Mechanics Magazine, September 1982, pg. 216 on google books. Here is the link. https://books.google.ca/books?id=f9kDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA216&lpg=PA216&dq=Duncan+Hill+Aerosphere+Pipes&source=bl&ots=fsZtVqD0z9&sig=Kl3wI-76NJqpFxAg8SPndnnWyqM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=owEcVdGGKdj9oQSD_4L4Bw&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAjgo#v=onepage&q=Duncan%20Hill%20Aerosphere%20Pipes&f=false Finally using the patent number in the ASP quote I was able to find the patent documents for the pipe on the US Patent Office site. I have included the documents from the US Patent Office here. There are four pages – 2 of drawings and two of description.

I love finding this old information and reading about the persistent search for the dryer cooler smoking pipe that has led to many creative solutions. It lends some colour to the work of my refurbishing to be able to read about the design ideas and the inventors themselves as I work on the pipes. Armed with new information I worked on the stems while the bowls were soaking in the alcohol bath. I cleaned the inside and outside of the stems with 99% isopropyl alcohol on cotton swabs and pipe cleaners. It took some scrubbing to clean out the grime built up around the interior of the carburetor insert in the stem and in the second chamber below the airway in the stem. The tars and oils were built up in there but far less so than I would have expected on these pipes from the 1980s.

With the stems cleaned and the carburetor air hole opened in both of them with a dental pick it was time to take the bowls out of the alcohol bath and begin to work on them. I dried off the bowls and pulled the loose reverse tenon out of the shank of the pot. I cleaned the shank with alcohol, cotton swabs and pipe cleaners then pressed the loose piece back in place. Once the alcohol evaporated the fit was tight. I cleaned the shanks on both pipes until the pipe cleaners and swabs came out white.

By the time I finished cleaning out the shanks the bowls had dried enough to ream them with the PipNet reamer. I cut back the cake in the billiard to the bare wood and cleaned up the light cake in the pot. In the photo below the wall of the billiard on the left looks damaged. I used a slightly larger reaming head and took back the remaining cake until the wood was clean and solid. Then it was time to work on the stems. I did a rough sand with 220 grit sandpaper to remove the sticky build up on the darker of the stems and to break up the oxidation on the other one. I followed that by sanding them both with a medium and fine grit sanding sponge.

I put them on the pipes to have a look at the progress of the restoration. I buffed the stems with red Tripoli and worked on the stubborn oxidation on the one stem. I then buffed it with White Diamond. I took them back to the work table and sanded them with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12,000 grit pads.

I rubbed the stems down with Obsidian Oil and when it had been absorbed I buffed the stems with Blue Diamond plastic polish. The oxidation still showed on the one stem so I started again and sanded it with the medium and fine grit stem and repeated the process through the micromesh and buffing until I had conquered the oxidation.

I buffed the stems with Blue Diamond once again and gave them multiple coats of carnauba wax. I buffed the smooth bowl with carnauba and a soft flannel buff. I stained the rusticated bowl with dark brown aniline stain diluted 1:2 with isopropyl alcohol and then buffed it with White Diamond. I finished that pipe with several coats of Halcyon II wax. The finished pipes are shown in the photos below.

A New Lesson Graces an Albertson Sandblasted Bent Bulldog Restore

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Guest Blog by Robert M. Boughton
Member, North American Society of Pipe Collectors
http://www.naspc.org
http://www.roadrunnerpipes.com
http://about.me/boughtonrobert
Photos © the Author

“Every failure is a lesson well learned, every success is a battle well fought, and every friend is a jewel well-kept in one’s heart.”
― Unknown

INTRODUCTION
As a valued friend and mentor, Chuck Richards can be counted on to tell me the truth, always. No matter how special are the occasions when his comments are clear thumbs-up, being thick-skinned, I can say with all honesty that I value more the constructive tips, outright lessons and even contributions (whether requested or not) that this gem of a friend has shared with me during the fleeting past three years since I made my first pipe restoration of a Czech-made La Grande Bruyère mini bent billiard. This openness in my character is fortunate, considering the greater incidence of the latter compared to the former.

Chuck with Victor Rimkus in a rare peaceful moment.

The only aspect of Chuck’s always invaluable input that sometimes frustrates me, as can happen in particular when two people are friends and see each other often, is his erratic timing. While for the most part Chuck speaks his mind with blunt promptness, he has far more projects in his own shop, not counting the free work he performs for customers at the tobacconist where he works, than I can even imagine. Therefore, he has the odd habit of briefing me on certain pipe restoration intelligence data, pertinent to my Need to Know clearance, crucial to my reputation and consequent success in the business.

By way of example, there was the time early last December when Chuck, after being approached by an unspecified number of my local customers with reports of un-thorough cleaning of the inner stems and shanks of some pipes I had sold to that date, at last brought up the subject. I was not only unhappy to learn that any of my friends and associates who paid money for my pipes were too worried they might “hurt my feelings” by giving me the chance to correct the problem myself; I was still more irked that Chuck failed to warn me after the first instance. [See https://rebornpipes.com/2014/12/10/in-retort-to-claims-of-unclean-restored-pipes-robert-m-boughton/ for the full story.] Of course Chuck then emphasized the importance of retorting, and in one mad 18-hour marathon when my retort kit arrived in the mail soon after, I corrected the problem with every remaining pipe on my sales list, as I have done with each pipe I’ve restored since.

And so, last Friday night at our weekly pipe club get-together I showed Chuck my latest finished projects. He examined them before leaning toward me to tell me discretely of another fellow club member who saw my array of pipes for sale next to his at the monthly Moose Club meeting, where we are free to sell. It seems the gentleman in question, who is getting into the restoration practice, wondered why my pipes (and his own, it turned out) looked “so dull” compared to Chuck’s. I am pleased that I was apprised of the comment soon afterward, but had to wonder why Chuck – who no doubt noticed the same effect long ago – didn’t tell me of the importance of using an un-waxed buffer wheel after each application of the various waxes that can be used to finish pipes.

I had more than usual difficulty grasping the process as Chuck explained it to me, until his third description, when some light in my head snapped on. I understood he was not talking about removing the nice shiny layer of wax applied with such care; he was describing a way to take off the excess wax and firm up the rest so that it would shine even more, not smudge and last longer.

“You won’t believe the difference in the look of the pipe when you use a clean buffer after each wax you put on it,” Chuck told me, smiling in relief and the genuine pleasure he derives from explaining anything pipe-related, when he saw that my head had wrapped around the whole idea.

Again, of course, I remembered Chuck’s work-load and other difficulties, not to mention the bombardment of questions he receives every day from friends and customers. I identified with the high probability that every time he planned to say something it simply slipped his mind.

At any rate, this blog concerns a lovely rusticated bent bulldog made by the Belgian company known as Albertson, which, after World War II, was taken over by the Hilson factory. Since that crafter went bankrupt in 1980, the Albertson brand has been continued by the Royal Dutch Pipe Factory.

Considerable work went into this particular restoration, the first opportunity to use my new knowledge of proper pipe waxing. Thank you, Chuck, for being a real friend again. I officially challenge anyone to inspect this bulldog and find anything whatsoever lacking in its inner and outer shimmer.

THE RESTORATION

When my now customary first step of OxiCleaning the stem was complete, the well-shaped and gently curved stem was clean but covered with green, white and brownish spots. I solemnly affirm that I documented the result with a photo, but it seems to have been lost due to a malfunction of my camera. Likewise, the effects of 220-grit sandpaper on removing the serious tooth chatter that marred both sides of the top of the stem, almost an inch below the lip, are gone. Even the lip had been gnawed and required intense sanding, but at least I avoided Black Super Glue.

I stripped the rusticated briar in Everclear. Again, the photos of the bare briar after this process are not to be found, although rubbing with super fine steel wool, then sanding the top of the bowl above the traditional line to make it lighter in color, followed by a thorough micro-meshing of the whole with five grades from 1500-4000 made the wood ready for buffing. The only way I can even begin to explain the absence of these particular photos is to note that all of them were taken in order during a short period of peculiar behavior by the DSLR.

After sanding the chamber with 320-grit paper followed by 200, I retorted the pipe. For the first time, that step required only one test tube of boiled alcohol, thanks to the excellent care by the previous owner and the Everclear soak. I had stained all of it but the top and rim with burgundy boot dye, which I flamed and hand-buffed with 4000 micromesh before resorting to 3600 to heighten the new red tone. Here is the briar when I was almost done prepping it for the final buffs. At the last moment, I decided to give the upper part of the bowl and the rim a final sanding with 320-grit paper and re-using the same micromesh progression as before to take it all the way down to its natural light brown color. All was in order to try out my newly-learned wheel buffing technique.

The stem took a little extra work with its extra lines, using the regular red Tripoli followed by White Diamond. I happened to have an extra, new buffer which I then attached to the electric wheel that had held the red Tripoli cloth. Beginning on the briar with a regular white Tripoli buff, I held it up in the light for a better look before I moved to the clean buffer and turned the wood with extra care. Again I held it up to see the change, which, as Chuck had promised, was prominent. Repeating these steps with White Diamond and at last carnauba (since I still need to replace my spent supply of Halcyon II), when the work was done I was truly impressed with the far finer and more solid shine.

CONCLUSION
I was fortunate to start with an estate pipe that was well-tended by it prior owner, and I like to think that he would be pleased with its new, sharper two-tone look. My only regret is that now I have to re-polish my entire growing collection of pipes for sale. But I am looking forward to the next monthly Moose Lodge meeting of the pipe club on the third Thursday of April. You can bet I’ll be there, with all of my pipes arranged proudly beside Chuck’s.

Still I wonder…what future comments might make their way to me via my good friend and mentor? Perhaps now my potential local customers might find the good grace and trust to approach me instead.

Sometimes I can’t help myself and have to refinish a new pipe – a Butz Choquin Belami Pocket Canadian

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Blog by Steve Laug

When I was in Stuttgart, Germany recently I purchased a petite pocket Canadian made by Butz Choquin. The cost was relatively cheap at 43€. It was stamped Butz Choquin Belami on the top of the shank and St. Claude in an arch over France. I like the contrast stain on the pipe and the fact that it would fit nicely in my coat pocket while traveling in Germany. When I returned to my hotel room I looked it up on the web. I found that it was listed as a Junior Pipe on the Butz Choquin Website and in fact there was a picture of a pipe that looked very much like the one I picked up. (http://www.butzchoquin.com/detail.php?id=BCBELUN5PF4) I liked the look, the shape and the size of the pipe as soon as I saw it and decided it was a pipe that would commemorate my trip to Stuttgart. There was a sandblast version of the pipe available as well and I looked them both over carefully before choosing the smooth one. I purchased the pipe and a pouch of one of the shop blends called Cigarren-Mezger Vaihinger Mischung Nr. 15 – an English mixture to christen the pipe. It was one of the only shop blends that did not have some kind of fruit topping. I took my newly purchased pipe and tobacco to a coffee shop across the street from the shop and loaded a bowl of the Vaihinger Mischung Nr. 15. I bought a cup of dark hot chocolate and fired up the bowl and sipped the hot chocolate. I was impressed by how well the pipe smoked. It delivered a flavourful and cool smoke from start to finish. Early in the bowl there was a slight charcoal taste from the bowl coating but it soon disappeared into the well rounded English smoke. While I smoked it I looked it over more carefully. Though it was smoking well the finish left much to be desired. It was rough to say the least. After smoking it a few moments I noticed that the stem had oxidized. I would need to think about what to do with the finish when I returned to Canada.

I smoked the pipe for the remaining week of my German trip and continually looked it over. As I had decided when I bought it the shape was perfect and the taper on the short stem fit well with the overall look of the pipe. It felt good in the hand and was a pleasure to smoke. But the rough finish became increasingly problematic to me. There were a lot of scratches in the briar on the surface of the rim and the rest of the bowl and shank. The contrast stain was nice with the dark black under coat that highlighted the grain and the lighter yellow brown top coat to add depth to the finish. But the pre-staining finish work was severely lacking as the scratches from the initial sanding were tactile and visible. A coat of varnish had been applied to the pipe that not only covered the bowl but also flowed over part of the stem. The varnish on the stem showed up when the pipe was smoked. The stem oxidized in weird patterns around the flow of the varnish. It gave the stem almost a flame pattern with the oxidation appearing from the button forward about a ½ inch along the jagged edges of the varnish coat. I would need to address the finish of the pipe when I returned to Canada.

I took it to the worktable and took the above photos before beginning to work on the pipe. Though it is hard to really see the roughness of the finish some of the scratches are visible in the photos. The oxidation of the stem is also less visible in the photos than it was in person. I stripped off the varnish using acetone on a cotton pad. I used it sparingly as I wanted to remove the varnish but not the stain. I sanded the pipe with a medium and a fine grit sanding sponge to remove the remaining varnish and also remove the scratches in the briar. I then sanded it with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12,000 grit pads. I sanded the stem as well with a fine grit sanding sponge and the micromesh sanding pads being careful to avoid the BC logo that was painted on the stem. Once the bowl was smooth I buffed it with White Diamond and then rubbed it down with a light coat of olive oil to enliven the finish and then gave the bowl and stem multiple coats of carnauba wax to protect the finish and vulcanite. I finished by buffing it with a soft flannel buff to raise the shine. I am happy with the finished pipe. Now not only does it smoke well but it feels better in the hand looks more finished to the eye. Sometimes I just can’t help myself and have to refinish a pipe that simply irritates my sensibilities.

(The apparent scratch on the pipe shown at the top of the photo that runs from the shank across the stem is merely a hair on the lens of the camera.)

Respecting a Maligned Pipe, with Two Yankee Doodler Dandies as Examples

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Guest Blog by Robert M. Boughton
Member, North American Society of Pipe Collectors
http://www.naspc.org
http://www.roadrunnerpipes.com
http://about.me/boughtonrobert
Photos © the Author

Oh I went down South for to see my Sal
Play polly wolly doodle all the day
My Sally is a spunky gal
Play polly wolly doodle all the day
Oh my Sal she is a maiden fair
Play polly wolly doodle all the day
With laughing eyes and curly hair
Play polly wolly doodle all the day
Fare thee well
Fare thee well
Fare thee well my fairy fey
For I’m going to Louisiana
For to see my Susyanna
Play polly wolly doodle all the day
― Beginning of “Polly Wolly Doodle,” author unknown

INTRODUCTION
The entire ditty, made famous by Shirley Temple’s iconic, vivacious wholesomeness in the super-duper 1935 movie “The Little Rebel,” goes on about a grasshopper that picks its teeth with a carpet tack and develops such a serious case of pertussis (the whooping-cough) that the unfortunate creature “sneezes” its head off in a well-turned euphemism. This is a U.S. contribution to songs taught to small children around the world, for some perverse reason, and ranks right up there with “Frère Jacques,” who is not asleep but dead from influenza, and “La Cucaracha,” the most common version of which touches on a cockroach unable to walk for lack of marijuana to fix it.

Still, the usage of the word doodle, which is not as common these days, illustrates the reason for the name of “The Doodler,” a pipe of some fame invented by Tracy Mincer, founder of Custom-Bilt, apparently sometime in the late 1950s or early ’60s. The line was perpetuated by the National Briar Pipe Co. after Mincer’s death in 1964 and was last made in 1980. The Oxford English Dictionary defines doodler as “one who draws or scrawls aimlessly,” hence the verb doodle for engaging in this activity (or lack thereof). That must have been how the innovator had his brainstorm. It seems Mincer had a sense of humor.

With something approaching their love of very few All-American wonders, including Mickey Mouse and Jerry Lewis, Frenchmen seem to have an affinity for The Doodler. (See http://www.pipephil.com/article-3285357.html, which should be translatable by your browser.) The author of the site calls this a “radiator” style. He also notes what he calls the brand’s unique look that he claims requires no special nomenclature or stem mark to identify one with certainty. But it just isn’t so. Take, for example, the following samples.

The Doodlers in this blog are of the type familiar to most of those pipe enthusiasts who have even heard of them. While I find beauty in many different forms, including those I restored and describe here, many of my friends, upon seeing The Doodlers for the first time, resort to evasions such as “Weird” and “I’ve never seen anything like this,” or more direct grimaces and even shudders in place of their true probable thoughts along the lines of “Ugly, ugly, ugly!” But as Margaret Wolfe Hungerford first paraphrased the ideas that many before her had suggested, in “Molly Bawn” in 1878: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” And all of The Doodlers do include a stamp, with a star on some stems.

Here are two of “The Doodlers” I could not resist buying online, for a good price, as they arrived in the mail. I had come across the peculiar pipe in scrolling through the listings on pipephil.eu under T for “The Everyman,” which referred me tersely to Everyman. But above it was “The Doodler.” Note the well-known ridges and patterns of holes drilled through the outer ridges of the bowls, which were intended to cool the pipes with air circulation, whether or not they in fact succeed in that purpose. An interesting sideline to this serendipitous discovery and mental note to acquire one was that the very next day, on my eBay homepage, I found a “suggestion” for The Doodler. I’m not sure I buy into one friend’s claim that it was the result of Google keeping track of my search history and offering up products to buy…but then again, the same thing does seem to be happening more often.

THE RESTORATIONS

The Saddle Stem Two-Ring Doodler

Neither of these stems was in bad shape other than one with some discoloration, but having determined to begin assuring even more thorough cleaning than I already have practiced the hard way, and knowing I had quite a few real messes awaiting restoration, I bought a tub of powdered OxiClean at the closest Walmart. My mentor, Chuck Richards, and others have recipes they prefer, but I have to start somewhere. I decided to begin this dual restoration with separate steps requiring two small Tupperware containers.

One, of course, was the OxiClean soak, for which I found instructions available on one website I located with clear directions. The other was for an Everclear strip of the old stains. And so – after filling one container with just enough warm water to cover the two stems and stirring in a little more than a tablespoon of OxiClean, and the other with a jar of used Everclear that was almost not enough to clear the tops of both bowls – I sat back and filled a pipe close at hand and relaxed for the next 20 minutes. And then while the briar dried and I finished the stem wash with cleaners and a scrubbing rag, I didn’t let those activities detract from my enjoyment of the fine tobacco. There seemed no good reason not to micromesh the saddle stem while I was at it. By the way, the foulness of the soapy water from the OxiClean soak gave me inner warmth only another restorer could understand.

Running a finger around the chamber before stripping the old stain, I knew the reaming and sanding would not be easy, but I hoped the pure grain alcohol soak would ease the job more than it in fact did. Although the inside of the bowl was somewhat smoother, and bits and even a chunk or two of cake came free with my second finger inspection, I realized the carbon buildup was not the true problem. The previous owner of this pipe had enjoyed it so often and with such complete faith in the professed cooling qualities of its unique radiator design that he overheated the chamber and created an even pattern of rather deep pocks.

Therefore I took my 21mm fixed reamer (the second largest) from its box and found that it embraced the chamber just short of close enough to serve as a measurement of its horizontal and vertical dimensions. Only the small square at the end to which the handle attached extended above the rim. I reamed the chamber a few times at different angles to cover all of it, emptying out the scant amount of carbon resulting as I progressed, and cleaned the inner briar with a small cotton cloth swab soaked in alcohol. Finding, as I expected, that the pocks were still prominent, I turned to a piece of 220-grit paper that removed more cake but had little impact on the smoothness. Turning to 150-grit, as I tend to do, I began to get somewhere, and after much tenacity and aurally irritating screeching achieved a level of regularity with which I could live, after a quick finish with 300.

I dipped a pipe cleaner in the Everclear and then ran in down through each vent hole to clear out more hidden dirtiness and scrubbed until they were clean.

The oddest part of this restore, to my thinking, was the difficulty of retorting after the thorough Everclear dip. The first round dredged up so much gunk that half of the shank leading to the draught hole was clogged to the point where the soft cleaner bunched up and would not pass. Each successive beaker brought out more dark nastiness, and the cleaners I passed through the shank as well as the small cotton cloths with which I scrubbed the chamber were filthy – until the last. I boiled the alcohol through the shank and into the bowl several times to be sure. When all was done, I had used seven beakers of Everclear, five soft cleaners, three cotton balls and as many cloth squares.

For the next step I wanted to clean up the bowl and shank to see what I had to work with. I used only a light rubbing with super fine steel wool. Happy with the ongoing progress, I took both pipes to Chuck at the shop.

He had no comment about the tapered three-ridge version, which on this rare occasion I understood meant it was looking okay. But I will never cease to be astonished by his ability to glance at a pipe for no more than two seconds and see all that is wrong with it. In this case he spotted a major horizontal crack within the upper ring of the saddle bit bowl, not to mention a minor crack. Without my magnifier glasses in the fluorescent light, I still could not see them until he held it beneath a certain ray of light. Then they were as clear as day, which it was. I suggested a mix of Super Glue and briar shavings, and Chuck concurred.

I was disappointed, not because of Chuck’s keen eyes and helpfulness in pointing out the serious flaw, but due to the fact that I had intended to keep the other and to my taste nicer Doodler for my own collection and offer the saddle bit for sale. Knowing then I could not in good conscience do this, I told him so.

“Sometimes that’s just the kind of trade-off you have to make,” Master Po pronounced with his big grin, chuckling that his Grasshopper was learning.

Returning later to my abode in Albuquerque’s War Zone, I sat on the couch that is my customary main work area and scrutinized the pipe.

I sanded the bottom of the tapered three-ridge bowl and collected the fine briar dust. Filling the cracks required two layers of the mixture, the second of which I applied more liberally. Getting into the groove with 300-grit paper to sand away the excess glue mix was a little tricky, and I thought I was done. However, after I sanded the yellowed areas and micro-meshed the whole thing using a full barrage of 1500, 1800, 2400, 3200, 3600 and 4000, I saw the grooves needed harsher measures.

I broke out the 220-grit and paid as close attention as possible to the white areas of remaining glue, then repeated the previous micromesh procedure to the one groove. Success at last! I stained the wood with marine cordovan (burgundy) leather dressing, flamed it and used a very light touch of micromesh 3200. I then removed myself and the prepped briar to my official workroom, where I buffed the wood with white and red Tripoli, White Diamond and several coats of carnauba.

The Tapered Stem Three-Ring Doodler

This tapered, three-ring classic style model appeared, at least to my eyes that are still in training, to be in better shape than the saddle stem version, not counting the stem that was discolored, the rim that was more darkened and the chamber that seemed to have more severe damage. In general, those are all superficial defects easy to remedy. Still, I chose to start with the saddle stem pipe because of my perception that it would be more difficult – and in part due to its nomenclature being faint almost to invisibility, I was going to offer it for sale on my site at the lowest price I offer. But oh, did I learn how appearances can be deceiving, and this three-ring pipe turned into a three-ring circus!

First, I will start with the good news. The OxiClean soak cleared away the discoloration and most of the other crud inside and out of the stem, and the rest came clean and ready to buff with some firm rubbing of a soft cloth, minor spot sanding and regular micro-meshing.

The initial problem I encountered was stripping the old stain. I have seen this happen before, of course, but not with almost identical pipes soaked for the same time with such radical results. Even after soaking the tapered pipe another two hours, it came out not down to the briar with nothing but a few yellow spots like the other pipe but almost unfazed.

At least it was cleaner, in particular the rim and rings, and the chamber showed signs of improvement. Also, removing the remaining cake and evening the chamber walls was no problem. As with the saddle stem Doodler, I ran a couple of alcohol soaked cleaners downward through the vent holes and removed some leftover grime. Even the retort this time was more typical, needing only a couple of beakers of Everclear to be boiled through the stem and shank and into the chamber.

The pipe as shown above was almost ready for the buffing wheels. I hand-buffed it starting with super fine steel wool, particularly on the still somewhat blackened rim and a few areas that needed a little work on the remaining roughness from the Everclear soak. I then progressed with micromesh pads using 1500, 2400, 3200, 3600 and 4000, with the results below shown only front and back. Of course I picked out the little piece of fluff visible in the front bottom ring.

The second Doodler was, indeed, ready to be stained. For the task I chose my Liebing’s brown leather stain, which is in fact a lighter shade than the Lincoln medium brown I have. Considering the large amount of residual original stain, but wanting to darken the briar a bit, I had a plan, if not yet the knowledge to carry it out to full effect. At any rate, I stained the bowl and shank as well as I could, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not work the applicator into the dratted grooves of the middle tier of smooth briar, although I was able to coat all three rings. Consulting my pictorial folder of the project that showed the original estate pipe, I noticed un-stained rings and grooves, and concluded I was ahead in the game, so to speak.

This was where I was mistaken. Have you ever had that feeling? The one that nags at you, whispering that despite all evidence to the contrary, there are the right way and the wrong, and this is definitely wrong? Yet still you didn’t follow your instincts?

Nevertheless, to make my act of self-destruction almost complete (there’s the modifier again – almost), I flamed the stain and eased off the char with 3200 micromesh before taking the pipe to the wheels. There I applied ever more beautiful coats of white Tripoli and red (to enhance the darkness of the grain) before White Diamond and a final coat of carnauba.

And so what, you might ask, was the major [expletive voluntarily deleted] malfunction with this tapered variant of The Doodler compared to the saddle stem? In short, the pipe that, to my eyes-in-training I mentioned before, appeared to be well used but more or less as its previous owner received it, had in fact been modified in a manner I did not detect. I very much suspect this pipe had only one prior owner, other than the conduit to me, after getting a close look at the crafty way he covered a ding that must have been, in tobacco pipe scale, comparable to a large patch of skin ripped from a person’s body.
And Chuck, when I showed him both pipes in progress before, pointed out the horizontal crack in the saddle stem pipe but appears to have assumed I was aware that the middle tier of smooth briar below the top ring was not made with the evenly spaced slots. I use the term “appears to have assumed” because of my utter inability to wrap my mind around the possibility that Chuck missed the alteration before he set it aside, especially considering his first words to me when I showed him the pipe I then hoped was finished. Again, I choose the word hoped because I was, at least, aware of the unstained grooves, and was hearing that shrewish voice again.

“Did you make this nick here?” Chuck asked, holding the pipe out to me and pointing, and puffing on his own pipe.

“No, it was there already,” I replied, not knowing where he was going. Surely he didn’t expect me to fashion and Super Glue a fragment of briar onto the tiny spot I beheld. Even he wouldn’t touch a blemish that small, I knew.

Chuck began to explain the situation to me, in his own way, which took me longer than usual to grasp. I felt like an idiot, although that was not Chuck’s intent. When at last I understood, a light went on in my mind.

“You mean someone, sometime slipped up and made a single gash in that area of the pipe and then, to fix his mistake, went around the bowl and made it uniform?” I said more than asked with a big smile of my own.

“Exactly!” Chuck said.

“Just like the way I had to rusticate the entire rim of the Italian No-Name Full Bent Billiard because of the one missing chunk,” I added by way of comparison.

“Yes!” Chuck exclaimed again, laughing and re-lighting his pipe. Then he brought up the missing stain and told me a small paint brush would do the trick.

And so to home I returned the first chance I had and, after lighting a bowl of tobacco, began the only other activity that has come to give me any real pleasure: restoring a pipe. Chuck’s advice to use a small brush did the trick, and I only had to stain, flame and fully buff the small circle of the truly prepped pipe. Still, I decided to add a couple more coats of carnauba to bring out an extra shine.

CONCLUSION
I forgot to mention the extra sanding of the rim and the top tier, making it lighter than the rest of the bowl and shank, and giving me the idea for a gentle two-tone effect. At this point in a rather long blog, I just don’t feel like going back to find and edit that part. These were not the easy restorations I thought they would be, and I’m tired…but very satisfied.

To Chuck, my friend and mentor, and Steve Laug, our host and my friend and frequent guide through the endless learning process, I owe much for these restores. Thank you, gentlemen.

Restemming & Working on New Staining Techniques on a Mastercraft Pot

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Blog by Steve Laug

The next pipe from the gift box is a Mastercraft Pot. It is stamped Mastercraft in a shield on the left side of the shank and Imported Briar over Italy on the right side. There are no shape numbers. There are a lot of fills on the bottom of the bowl and the right side of the bowl. The finish is a thick coat of what appears to be urethane – almost plastic looking. Someone had previous started refurbishing it – to bowl had been carefully reamed and the bowl topped. There was a large fill on the rim that was loose that ran from the middle of the right side of the bowl almost all the way across the rim. This pipe would be a great one to experiment with using different stains to blend the fills and highlight the grain. The urethane coat would prove a challenge to remove completely but once gone it would prove a perfect candidate for the new staining techniques I wanted to learn. The band on the shank is aluminum and is oxidized and dull. The stem is a replacement that is poorly fit. It is loose in the shank and does not fit against the shank well. The tenon is very short and almost conical in shape. I will break the work on this pipe into two parts: Part 1: Fitting a Stem and Part 2: The Staining Experiment and a Conclusion called Finishing Touches.

I took a few close-up photos of the rim and the stem. These will help to give an idea of the state of affairs when I brought the pipe to the work table.

Part 1: Fitting a Stem

I removed the stem and found two possible replacements in my stem can. The original replace in the one at the bottom of the photo below. The two options were a longer taper and a saddle stem. Both of them worked well with the length of the shank. They looked better than the one the pipe arrived with. I tried the bowl with each of the stems to get an idea of the look of the pipe. I made a decision for the taper once I had seen them both in place in the shank.

The taper stem was slightly larger in diameter than the shank so I would need to adjust the diameter. I cleaned out the shank and the stem with pipe cleaners, cotton swabs and isopropyl alcohol to remove the tars and oils from the shank. Because someone had already started the process on this pipe it was not a long clean. It took very few cleaners before the shank was clean.

I sanded the stem with 220 grit sandpaper to start and then decided it was taking too much time. I used the Dremel with a sanding drum and quickly removed the excess material.

I brought it back to the work table and sanded it with 180 and 220 grit sandpaper to smooth out the marks left by the sanding drum. I needed to fine tune the fit but it was working with the bowl.

Part 2: The Staining Experiment

To prepare the bowl for staining I needed to do the repairs and remove the old finish. I decided to re-top the bowl to remove some of the damage and smooth out the area around the fill on the right side top and edge. I wanted to bring the top down to lessen the area that the fill intruded on. I wiped the bowl down with acetone to remove the finish only to find that it did not work to cut through the finish. Before I intruded on the finish with my next measure I decided to repair the fill on the outer edge of the rim on the right side. I used briar dust and super glue to repair the fill on the side and top of the rim. Most of the fill had been smoothed out on the top but there was some of the fill missing on the edge of the rim. I cleaned and sanded the repair to blend it into the finish. When that was smoothed out I sanded the bowl with a medium grit sanding sponge to break the gloss of the finish and then dropped it into the alcohol bath. When I took it out of the bath the finish was dulled but still not broken. This top coat was a real bear to remove. I needed to do quite a bit more sanding on the coating to remove the finish. Once the finish was gone and I was at bare wood I decided I would use a three part staining process to try to hide the fills and blend them into the briar. I wanted to try something new as well with the staining of this pipe. I wiped it down a final time with acetone to clean off the dust and any remnants of finish, scrubbing hard around the stamping on the shank. I stained it with a medium walnut stain, flamed it and buffed it.

When the stain dried I gave it a light buff with a cloth and a shoe brush and then gave it the second coat of stain. This time I gave it a coat of oxblood coloured stain. I wanted to bring out the grain on the sides and front and back of the bowl and try to blend the fills more. I stained it and flamed the stain.

When that stain dried I buffed the bowl with White Diamond and wiped it down with isopropyl to even out the stain coat. I hand buffed it afterwards with a soft cloth. The bowl was beginning to take on the colour I wanted from these first two coats of stain.

Then it was time for the third coat of stain. I stained the pipe with a dark brown aniline stain. I applied it and flamed it and repeated the process until I had good coverage on the pipe. The dark brown looked opaque when first applied.

I buffed the pipe with White Diamond on the wheel and gradually the grain began to show through the finish. The combination of stains gave the pipe precisely the colour I was wanting – a warm reddish brown with dark highlights in the grain patterns. The fills though still present, did not stick out as badly and seemed to blend into the finish.

Conclusion: Finishing Touches

With the finish on the pipe completed I worked on the stem. I sanded it with a fine grit sanding sponge and then with micromesh sanding pads. I also sanded the band on the shank with the micromesh pads at the same time. I wet sanded with 1500-2400 grit pads and sanded the band without the stem present. You have to be careful with the pads when polishing metal as they will leave a dark stain on the briar and the vulcanite. I rubbed the stem down with Obsidian Oil and dry sanded the stem with 3200-12,000 grit pads. I polished the band with the same and also with a silver polishing cloth. After each set of three pads I rubbed the stem down with the oil. When I had finished the stem I gave it a final coat of the oil and then let it dry.

The next photos show the finished pipe. It is a rich brown/red colour that has warmth and depth to it. The silver band and the new stem make the pipe look quite rich. I figure it is at least as nice or nicer than when it left the Mastercraft warehouse.

Giving a Yorkshire Natural Billiard a new look – Restain & Cumberland Stem

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Blog by Steve Laug

I am slowly but surely working my way through the gift box of pipes I received. The next one that I chose to work on was a billiard. It is stamped Yorkshire in an arch over Natural and another reverse arch with the words Algerian Briar. The stem on it was a replacement and did not fit well on the shank. It was slightly smaller in diameter and also had rounded shoulders. The angles and flow of the stem did not work well with the pipe in my opinion as the taper on the top of the stem was different from the one on the bottom side. The bowl itself was clean but and the finish dirty. The rim had been damaged around the outer edge on the front of the bowl rounding it slightly. The stamping was clear and distinct. From what I can find on the internet the Yorkshire brand is a US Made pipe that came from Barnaby Briars (smoking pipe retailer) that was located at 28 Powell St. in Brooklyn (NY). They also made pipes stamped Barnaby. The Germanic Script differentiates it from the other Yorkshire Brand that was made in Italy by Gasparini for Sears and Roebuck. The right side of the bowl had the only fills present on the pipe – and there were about five of them visible. The largest is almost in the middle toward the back. These fills were hard, smooth and tan in colour.

The close-up photo of the rim below shows the rounding of the edges on both the front and the back sides of the rim. I absolutely hated the look of the stem on this pipe so I went through my can of stems until I found one that would work well. It was a well broken in stem that had a lot of oxidation and calcification on the top and bottom of the stem. There were no tooth marks which were a bonus and the stem was Cumberland! Once I had cleaned up the bowl and the stem the combination would look really good.

The tenon was slightly larger than the mortise so I used a Dremel with a sanding drum and took some of the Cumberland material off the tenon. I worked on it until it was close to fitting. Then I took it back to the work table and use a folded piece of sandpaper to get a good snug fit in the mortise. I had no idea that there was a brass band that was a part of the stem until I began to clean it up.

When the stem was in place I sanded the stem and the junction of the shank and stem to make sure that the fit was smooth and the transition was as seamless as I could make it. I sanded with 220 grit sandpaper to even things out. As I did it I found that there was a brass coloured band that was a part of the stem. I removed the stem and cleaned off the face of the stem and found the band extended across the face of the stem like a washer around the tenon. I really liked the way the stem tapered quickly to from the shank to the button.

I topped the bowl on a topping board to remove the damage on the rim and clean up the outer edges. I wanted to remove the damaged, rounded edges. I also sanded the scratches on the underside of the bowl. I sanded the stem and shank with a medium and a fine grit sanding sponge. I also sanded the brass shank adornment to remove the scratches and polish it. I wiped it down with a wet cloth to remove the sanding dust. The Cumberland is coming to life the more I sand it and remove the oxidation and buildup. The lines of red and burgundy flow through the stem horizontally along the taper and the sides.

I took a picture of the pipe and stem with the old stem beside it for comparison sake. The stem is about ¼ inch longer than the old one and the taper more radical. The Cumberland looked better with the briar than the old as well. I wiped down the bowl and shank with acetone on cotton pads to remove the oils and grime that was on the surface of the briar. I wanted to bring the rest of the briar as close to the colour of the sanded rim and shank.

I cleaned out the shank and the stem with cotton swabs, pipe cleaners and isopropyl alcohol to remove the tars and oils.

I sanded the stem and shank with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12,000 grit pads. I rubbed the stem down with Obsidian Oil between each set of three pads. I did not let the oil dry between rub downs as I find that the oil gives the micromesh some cut on the surface of the stem. The translucence of the Cumberland really shows through the shine.

I rubbed the bowl and down with olive oil and let it soak into the briar. The oil brought out the reddish brown tones of the briar and made the grain stand out. Sadly it also made the fills on the right side of the bowl stand out as well.

While the brown tones stood out well I wanted to bring out some of the red tones in the briar. To highlight the reds I stained the bowl with a coat of oxblood stain. Before I stained the briar I used a permanent black marker to darken the fills on the side of the bowl. When it had dried so that it would not rub off when I put the stain coat on the bowl. I applied the stain with a cotton pad and then flamed it. Once it dried I polished the bowl with White Diamond on the buffing wheel. The finished pipe is shown below.

The rich colours of the briar work really well with the reds of the Cumberland stem. The light brass band that separates the stem and the shank adds a light brass coloured horizontal line that breaks up the vertical Cumberland and the horizontal grain of the briar.

The sharp edges of the rim and the grain on the surface look far better than the round outer edge of the bowl.

Restoring a NATIONAL Washington DC Square Shank Billiard

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Blog by Steve Laug

I picked up this little square shank billiard in a foursome I purchased on EBay. I wanted the Rhodesian in the lot and the others were really just a bonus. This one was in the group but there was no information on it in the advert. When I saw it in the listing I thought it had a bit of a look like an older Comoy’s or even an old GBD square shank. There was no stamping visible in the photos. The stem had some heavy calcification and tooth marks in the photo and what appeared to be a bite through on the topside of the stem. Once it arrived I would have a better idea of what I had purchased.

When I opened the box, of course I went for the BBB Rhodesian first and it was the first pipe I cleaned up. The apple shaped pipe at the top was a Bertram and it was my second cleanup. I pretty much ignored the little square shank billiard as the stem was a mess that I did not feel like tackling at the moment. Shortly after receiving this one I got a gift box of more pipes so this one was pushed to the bottom of the refurb box.

Finally last evening I decided to take it out of the box and examine it more closely. It had faint stamping on the left side of the shank that read NATIONAL over WASHINGTON DC. In many ways it reminded me of the stamping on the Bertram apple that is shown above. It read Bertram in script over WASHINGTON DC. There was no other stamping on the sides, top and bottom of the pipe.

The bowl had a heavy, hard cake that had chunks missing out of it in the bowl sides. The rim was heavily caked and tarred and also had cuts in the top of the rim and dents and chips in the outer edge of the rim.

The underside of the bowl and shank had been flattened to create a sitter. There were scratches and dents in the finish of the bowl. The bowl had evidently been finished like the Bertrams as well in that it did not have a stain coat. It had picked up a patina in the finish over the years that had some red overtones that would come out nicely once the bowl was cleaned up. The stem was in rough shape. With a buildup of white calcification that went half way up both sides of the stem. There were also a lot of tooth marks on the top and bottom sides of the stem. The stem was upside down in the photos and did not align properly with the square shank. I turned it over and everything fit very well. The stem had a pinhole like bite through in the surface that would need to be repaired. The stem itself had a slight cant to the right when it was manufactured and that could not be changed without drastically reworking the stem. The slot in the airway was clogged to an airhole the size of a pin that allowed minimal airflow and would not take a pipe cleaner.

Topside of the stem

Underside of the stem

With the stem removed from the shank it was obvious that the shank had never been cleaned out and had a thick build up of tars and oils. The tenon was a step down version and the step itself was tarred and caked to the point that the step did not show.

I had a gut feeling that the pipe had some connection to Bertram Pipe Company of Washington DC but only the vaguest memory of that connection. I could not remember where I picked that up but just had the memory. I did some searching on the Internet and found a National Briar Pipe Company of Jersey City, New Jersey with no clear ties to Washington DC on the Pipedia site. This was the company that purchased the Doodler after Tracy Mincer died. I could see that the Jersey City pipes were stamped differently and all had line names stamped on them. On the Pipephil site I found an English version that had very different stamping on the left side of the shank as well as Made in England on the right side of the shank.

I also posted a question on Smokers Forum and Pipe Smokers Unlimited regarding the brand. I received several responses that gave me information. One of them on SF came from Ed Klang and provided me with some confirmation regarding my memory of the connection with Bertram. I quote him in full, “In the history of the Bertram company, after the fire at the Washington facility and the decision was made to discontinue Bertram production a group of employees and a few investors wanted to buy the rights to the Bertram name, which was turned down and it was then proposed that they would rebrand the pipes as National, no mention was made whether anything ever came of that proposal. Supposedly this group did produce pipes for a while but the effort was finally abandoned and I have never been able to reliably confirm this. Just bits and pieces here and there.” Thanks Ed. This is the random memory that I was trying to dig up.

I also received a reply on SF from Radiobob that read as follows: “National Pipe and Tobacco was located on the 1700 block of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., just about a block from where I worked. I still have two Canadians that I bought there, as well as a Comoy’s Patina Apple. In my recollection, it closed down–much to my regret–in the mid to late 1980s.”

Those responses gave me the kind of details that I always find helpful in my restoration work. I will continue to do some digging on the company and see what I can find but that bit confirmed the visual tie to the Bertram Company of DC. Thank you for your help Ed and Bob.

I started work on the pipe by removing the stem and then reaming the bowl. The cake was hard as a rock but by beginning with the smallest cutting head of my PipNet reamer and working up to the third cutting head I was able to ream the bowl back to bare briar.

You can see in the photo above that there were still some rough places on the side of the bowl that needed more attention. I used a pen knife/letter opener that I keep in my refurb tool kit to carefully scrape away the remnant of cake. I started to slowly sand the top of the rim with a folded piece of sandpaper but found the damaged areas significant enough that I decided to top the bowl and reshape the top of the rim by hand afterwards.

I scrubbed the bowl down with acetone on cotton pads to remove the grime that had been rubbed into the bowl sides and shank. There were a few fills present but I figured that once I oiled the bowl these would blend into the reddish finish of the briar.

I reshaped the rim with a folded piece of sandpaper to smooth out the rough spots on the outer edge and to give the rim a slight bevel toward the inner rim edge. I wiped it down with acetone and cotton pads as well. I set the bowl aside for a bit and worked on the stem. I sanded the stem surface to remove the tooth marks and the calcium buildup. I also wanted to remove the light oxidation that was underneath that and to also clean up the stem enough that I could see the extent of the damage around the bite through on the topside. The first photo below is enlarged to show the hole. It was not huge but there were small cracks radiating around the hole. There were no holes on the bottom side of the stem or tooth marks along the sides.

I picked the area around the small hole with a dental pick to remove any loose pieces of vulcanite that were present and then scrubbed down the area on the top of the stem with alcohol to clean it up for the repair. I greased a pipe cleaner with Vaseline Petroleum Jelly and inserted it in the airway under the hole. I filled the hole with a large drop of black super glue, intentionally overfilling it in order to have the glue go into the spidering cracks around the edges. I set the stem aside for the evening and let it cure. In the morning when the glue had cured I used a needle file to redefine the button and then sanded the repair with 220 grit sandpaper to remove the excess and feather it into the surface of the stem.

I sanded the stem with a medium and fine grit sanding sponge and found that while the major hole was filled and solidly repaired there was a small air bubble that once sanded produced a small hole that also needed to be fixed. It was right next to the newly shaped button. I used a drop of clear super glue to repair that. It dries quickly so I could easily sand it and blend it into the stem.

I sanded the patch and the stem with a medium and fine grit sanding sponge. The results can be seen in the photos below. The hole is gone and the stem is ready for polishing.

I sanded the bowl, shank and stem with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads. I rubbed down the stem with Obsidian Oil and while it dried I decided to rub down the bowl with a light coat of olive oil. It serves to highlight the grain and brings out the red in the briar. The next four photos show the pipe at this point in the refurb.

I dry sanded the stem, bowl and shank with 3200-12,000 grit pads. I rubbed the stem down with Obsidian Oil between each set of three pads and gave the stem a final coat of the oil after the 12,000 grit pad.

I buffed the pipe and stem with White Diamond and gave them both multiple coats of carnauba wax. I buffed it with a soft flannel buff to raise the shine. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. The olive oil really highlights the red tints in the briar and shows the contrast between the birdseye and the background briar as well as the grain on the front, back, top and bottom of the shank and bowl. It truly is a beautiful pipe – the briar is well grained and the fills disappear into the red colour of the briar.

Restoring a Heritage Heirloom 94C Outdoorsman

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Blog by Andrew Selking

Ever since I stumbled across my first Heritage pipe, I have been on a quest to find more. Heritage pipes represent the pinnacle of American craftsmanship from the Kaufman Brothers and Bondy (KB&B) family of pipes. I will not go into great detail about the Heritage line, but here is a link for further information. https://rebornpipes.com/2014/12/23/the-wonderful-world-of-heritage-briars/

Although Heritage pipes used Kaywoodie shape numbers, this particular pipe’s shape is not in any of the Kaywoodie catalogues that I have (1936, 1947, 1955, and 1972). It has an apple shape bowl, a long shank, and a ¼ bent saddle bit. It’s a small pipe, weighing in at exactly one ounce and measuring 4.9 inches long, and as befitting its namesake I can envision the owner fly fishing while smoking it. What really amazed me about this pipe though is the cross grain. It starts at the front of the bowl and runs vertically throughout the entire pipe into the shank. I have never seen anything quite like it.

The pipe arrived in good shape, a slight tar build up on the rim, some minor oxidation on the stem, and a single tooth mark under the button. Here is what it looked like.

I started by giving the bowl an alcohol bath. The purpose of the bath is not to sanitize the pipe, the alcohol just loosens up all of the crud (tar, cake, un-burned tobacco etc.). While the bowl marinated, I soaked the stem in Oxyclean. The Oxyclean brings out the oxidation and helps loosen the gunk inside the stem. I usually run a fuzzy stick through the stem while I still have the cleaning solution. That’s always a good indicator how much work I will have during the next step. Fortunately, this stem didn’t look too bad. Notice the brown oxidation. Once I finished the inside of the stem, I took an old tooth brush and some tooth paste and removed the worst of the oxidation. This also had the benefit of making the white inlay nice and bright.

Next up was removing the cake from the bowl. After a 24 hour soak, it is very easy to remove even the most stubborn cake. After removing the cake it was time to tackle the shank using the retort. She was a dirty girl.

I ended up retorting the shank five times! Not sure what kind of tobacco the previous owner smoked or if he ever used pipe cleaners.

Next up, the shank. As I’ve mentioned before, if you retort the shank separately make sure you plug the end to prevent boiling alcohol and tobacco juice from spewing everywhere. Fortunately most of the nastiness was in the shank and the stem only required one fuzzy stick. The final cleaning step was removing the tar and cake from the rim. I used 0000 steel wool and acetone. The steel wool does a nice job removing the tar without damaging the finish.

There were a couple of dents in the side of the bowl, so I used steam to raise the dents. I then used a progression of micro mesh pads, 1500-12,000 grit in preparation for staining. Here is the bowl ready for stain.

You can see the grain is everywhere. I used Pimo Pipe Supply medium walnut stain, diluted by 50%, to even out the color. Followed by a furniture pen to add a little bit of red tint. Here is the final result. I used 400 grit wet/dry sandpaper with water to remove the tooth mark and oxidation. I’ve started using a rubber washer, placed over the tenon, to make sure that I don’t round the edges of the stem while sanding. After the 400 grit, I used 1500, 1800, and 2400 grit micro mesh with water. Once the stem dried I finished polishing it with a progression of micro mesh pads, 3200-12,000 grit, followed by white diamond and carnauba wax with my rotary tool. I buffed the bowl on the buffing wheel with White Diamond and carnauba wax. Here is the finished pipe.