Tag Archives: York Pipes

Restoring a York Super London Made Bent Billiard

Blog by Steve Laug

In a recent box of pipes that my brother Jeff sent to me from Idaho there was an interesting little pipe. It came in its own black leather case with a gold felt lining. There was a logo on the inside that read Guaranteed London Made. The case was in excellent condition. The pipe inside was really good looking and from the stem shape and orific button it was clear that it had some age on it. It was stamped on the left side of the shank with the words YORK over SUPER and on the right side of the shank with the words LONDON MADE. For a pipe of this age I was surprised that the finish was still in pretty decent condition. The only real issue of consequence was a spot on the right side where there was a large fill that was falling out. The bowl had a thin cake around the top half of the bowl while the lower part of the bowl appeared to be unsmoked. It had not even darkened from smoking it. There was some minor rim damage on the outer edge toward the bowl front where the pipe had been knocked out against something hard. There were some nicks on the front edge and there were some dents in the rim but they were not too bad. The rest of the finish was dirty and dull but would clean up nicely. The stem had tooth marks and chatter at the button on both the top and bottom sides of the stem and it was oxidized. The vulcanite was older and was a good quality rubber. The button was an older orific style with a single hole in the end. I liked the overall look of the pipe.The next series of photos show the large fill toward the front on the lower right side of the bowl. It was a pink putty fill and it was crumbling revealing the flaw in the briar. The third photo captures the crumbling area of the fill. It would need to be picked out and refilled. The next two photos show the stamping on both sides of the shank. It was sharp and readable and did not show signs of over buffing.My brother took two photos of the stem to show its condition. The photos show the oxidation on the stem and the nature of the tooth marks near the button. The quality of rubber used in this old timer can be seen in the lack of oxidation.I have restored on other older York pipe and from my research I found that it was probably made by KB&B. The London Made stamp on the cover of the case and on the pipe led me to consider several other options but the stamping itself matches exactly the style used by KB&B. From what I could find they also had London Made pipes like this. I would love to find the back story on this brand but at this point this is all I could find. Do any of you have any more information on the brand? Post it here for all of us to learn from. Thank you ahead of time for your help.

My brother did his usual stellar cleanup of the pipe. He scrubbed the surface with Murphy’s Oil soap and removed the buildup of wax and oils on the exterior of the bowl. He reamed the bowl and cleaned out the mortise and airway in the shank and the stem with pipe cleaners, cotton swabs and alcohol. When I ran a pipe cleaner through the pipe it came out clean. The chamber and mortise area showed that this pipe had not been heavily smoked. The stem was clean on the inside and needed no more work on my part. The light tooth marks and chatter would be fairly simple to remove. When it arrived at my work table I took the following photos of the pipe both in and out of the case. The shape is one of my favourites and the diminutive size make it a pipe that probably traveled well in a pocket. I took some close up photos of the bowl, rim and stem to show the condition of the pipe before I started the restoration process. The large pink putty fill was really ugly on the bottom right side of the bowl. It was cracked and chipped, but even if it were not I would still pick it out and start over. The grain on the pipe is quite nice but this eyesore of a fill makes it disappear from view. I picked the fill out completely with a dental pick. I wiped down the surface of the bowl around the area that needed to be repaired with alcohol on a cotton pad. I packed in some briar dust and put some drops of clear super glue on top. I added more briar dust and super glue until the surface bulged slightly above the bowl surface.When the repair dried I sanded the area with 220 grit sandpaper to blend the surface of the fill into the surrounding briar. I sanded it with a medium and a fine grit sanding sponge to remove the scratch marks. I refilled the small air bubbles that had showed up in the surface of the bowl with some more super glue and then sanded them again. Once the surface was smooth I wiped down the bowl with alcohol to remove the finish before restaining the pipe. I use alcohol as it does not react to the super glue repair like acetone does. Acetone actually dissolves the super glue and compromises the repaired area. At this point I could have left the rim alone and not worried about the nicks and dings. They do not show up well in the photos but they were very visible in person. I could also feel them when I ran a finger over the rim. To put it mildly, they bugged me. I lightly topped the bowl to remove the damage and minimize the damage to the front edge. I sanded the bowl with a medium and a fine grit sanding sponge to remove the scratches. I was happier with the rim top now that I had finished it.I stained the pipe with a dark brown aniline stain and flamed it to set it in the grain of the briar. I have found that when a pipe has been previously stained with a oxblood colour that it will come out in the final colour of the dark brown stain and give the pipe a rich patina that is really close to the original colour.I wiped the bowl down with alcohol on cotton pads to make it more transparent and help the grain show. You will notice in the second photo that the filled area is still showing. I needed to do a little more work on that to get it to blend in more. I used a black Sharpie pen and touched up the spots on the fill that looked lighter than the bowl. I hand buffed the pipe to give it some lustre and touched up the area of the fill with some more dark brown stain. I set the bowl aside to dry and turned my attention to the stem. I sanded out the tooth chatter and tooth marks with 220 grit sandpaper. I polished the stem with micromesh sanding pads – wet sanding with 1500-2400 grit pads and dry sanding with 3200-12000 grit pads. I repeatedly rubbed the stem down with Obsidian Oil and after the final sanding pad gave it a last coat of the oil and let it dry. I put the stem back on the pipe and buffed the pipe with Blue Diamond on the buffing wheel. I find that Blue Diamond gives lustre to the briar and the vulcanite. I gave the bowl and stem multiple coats of carnauba wax and buffed it with a clean buffing pad to raise the shine. Don’t skip this step in the process. Many folks do not buff with a clean pad after the waxing and miss out on giving the pipe a rich shine by missing this. I hand buff my pipes afterward with a microfibre cloth as I find that it deepens the shine and evens out the finished look on the briar and rubber. The finished pipe is shown in the photos below. The elegant shape of the older bent billiards is quite captivating. These smaller, compact ones have a definitive look all their own. Thanks for looking.

Repairing and Restemming a York (KBB) Diamond Shank Bent Billiard

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Blog by Steve Laug

When I was traveling in Idaho my brother and I took the family for a trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. On the way we stopped in a little town called Victor, Idaho. There was an antique shop there in the town and I found four more old pipes. The first of these reminded me of an old WDC Diamond shank billiard that I have. This one was stamped YORK on the left side of the shank and from research it may have been made by KBB. It was in rough shape. The shank had been cracked and repaired with glue and a piece of twisted wire. The stem obviously had a broken tenon and the previous owner had carved it down to fit in the shank anyway. The bowl had a thick cake and the finish was gone. The rim was damaged on the front outer edge and there was some tar on the rim.

On the right side of the bowl near the shank junction there was a pink putty fill that was coming out. Most of the putty had fallen out of the briar. This would need to be repaired. When I got back home I took the pipe out of the bag to have a look. The silver end cap had some hallmarks but they were the faux hallmarks that I have found on older American made pipes to give them a touch of class. All four edges of the band were split. I removed the stem and looked inside the mortise and could see that a major part of the briar was missing on the right side of the shank under the cap. With little effort I removed the cap and sure enough a huge chunk was missing out of the briar. In fact the whole right side under the cap was gone. There was a small crack that had been repaired earlier. There was a small hole in the shank to stop the crack and the crack was glued and clamped with the wire. This was going to take a bit of work to bring it back from the brink of destruction. I clipped the wire with a pair of wire cutters so that I could work on repairing the broken portion of the shank. This repair would take some careful and time consuming work to rebuild the missing portion of briar. I reamed the bowl to clean out the thick cake. It was crumbling so I wanted it removed so that the repair of the shank would be less dirty. I use a PipNet reamer to take the cake back to the bare briar.

The first step in rebuilding the broken area was to clean up the damaged ends of the remaining briar. Once it was clean I put clear super glue on the raw edge of the broken spot and tamped the end into some briar dust. I repeated the process until the edge was repaired as much as possible with this method.

During the process I also picked out the broken putty fill and replaced it with briar dust and super glue. I sanded the flat surface of each of the four sides of the diamond shank smooth with 220 grit sandpaper until the cap slid easily over the shank. I also faced the end of the shank on the topping board.

The next step in the process of rebuilding the shank and the mortise was a little more difficult than the briar dust and super glue rebuild. It involved working on the internals of the shank. I glued the end cap in place with wood glue and clamped it in place to take care of small splits in the edges of the metal cap. Once that dried and set, I mixed white wood glue with briar dust to make putty. I tamped the mixture into the remaining areas of the shank with a dental pick and dental spatula until the area was filled solid looking once again. The next two photos show the rough repair on the inside of the mortise and shank. The broken area is gone! The holes are filled in and the repair is complete. Once the glue set I would have to clean up the mortise and make the walls smooth. The edges of the metal cap, looking at it from the end are damaged and I will not be able to repair them.

While the shank repair cured I worked on the rim. There was a thick tar build up that was like rock on the back edge and the front edge of the rim had been knocked against something hard and was rough. I decided to top the bowl to remove the rock hard tar and also minimize the damage to the front of the bowl. I used a topping board with 220 grit sandpaper and worked the rim against the sandpaper until the damage was minimized. Once I had it smoothed out I put some briar dust and super glue on the remaining divot on the front edge of the bowl as a fill. When it dried I sanded it smooth and lightly topped the rim once more to even out the repair with the rest of the rim. (That picture will be shown shortly.) The stem that came with the bowl was damaged beyond repair. It had been repeatedly been cut off by the previous owner and hacked at until it fit in the damaged tenon. It was not a stem I would use again on this pipe. I went through my can of stems and found a faux p-lip stem – the airway came out the end of the button rather than on the top. It was old enough to work on this pipe and with some modification I thought it would look just right. The problem was that it did not have a tenon. When I found it the tenon was missing and the end of the stem had been drilled out to receive a replacement tenon. I am currently out of Delrin tenons so I used a thin vulcanite stem as the sacrificial tenon. I glued the tenon on the donor stem in place in the diamond shaped stem with super glue and then cut off the stem with a hacksaw. I left a piece of vulcanite that was longer than necessary so that I could work it to a proper fit in the repaired shank.

The next photo shows the repaired stem and tenon and the topped bowl before I put the two parts together. I used a Dremel to remove the excess material on the new tenon and shortened it to the depth of the mortise in the shank. The next photo shows the repaired fill on the bowl side with another photo of the new stem. Once the shank repair was dry I used a needle file to clean up the rough areas and smooth out the inside of the mortise. I gave it several more coats of glue and briar dust to buildup the areas that had shrunk as the glue dried. I continued to work it with the files and sandpaper until the fit was correct. I cleaned out the airway to the bowl and the inside of the mortise with alcohol, cotton swabs and pipe cleaners in preparation for putting the new stem in place. The next two photos show the newly fit stem. There was still work to do to fine tune the flow of the diamond stem sides to match the flow of the diamond shank but the look is clear at this point in the process.

I sanded the stem with 220 grit sandpaper and with a medium and a fine grit sanding sponge to fine tune the fit. When I had it the way I wanted, it was time to bend the stem. I used my heat gun to do the work. In this case I quickly set it up on the dryer in our laundry room (shh don’t tell my wife I did this) and heated the stem. I bent it over an old rolling pin that I use for this purpose until the bend in the stem matched the curve of the bottom of the bowl. I set the bend by holding the stem under cool running water.

The next two photos show the newly bent stem and give an idea of how it will look with the pipe once it is finished.

With the easiest part of fitting a stem completed I went on to do the laborious and tedious part of sanding and more sanding to get the fit just right. To do this without rounding the edges of the stem at the shank stem junction I use a plastic washer placed between the two areas. I sanded the stem with 220 grit sandpaper to smooth out the transition and make the angles square (or at least as square as possible on these old pipes where every side has a different angle and width). When I had the fit of the stem correct it was time to polish it. I wet sanded with 1500-2400 grit micromesh sanding pads and rubbed the stem down with Obsidian Oil. I needed a break from the stem work so I turned my attention to the bowl. I rubbed it down with a light coat of olive oil to highlight the grain. I took a few photos to show what it looked like at this point. It is certainly looking far different than it did when I started working on it. There is a deep richness in the red tones of the briar.

I decided to highlight those tones with a dark brown aniline stain thinned by 50% with some isopropyl alcohol. I applied it and flamed it to set it in the grain. I hand buffed it with a cotton cloth to get an idea of the coverage. It was still too dark to my liking so I would need to address that.

I wiped the bowl down with some acetone on a cotton pad to remove some of the stain and make the grain show through better.

I buffed the bowl with White Diamond and then gave it the first of many coats of carnauba. I don’t know about you but by this point in a long refurbishment I get a bit anxious to see what I have accomplished. It always seems that it is going to go on forever so I rewarded myself by putting the stem in place and taking a few photos to see what I had achieved.

For comparison purposes I took the next two photos of the pipe with the old stem next to the new one. You can see how badly hacked the vulcanite was from the previous owners salvage work on his broken pipe. The pipe is beginning to look like a very different pipe than when I started. That always encourages me!

Now it was time to finish up with this long project and get the stem done. I dry sanded it with 3200-4000 grit micromesh sanding pads and then rubbed it down with Obsidian Oil once again. I then dry sanded it with 6000-12000 grit pads and gave it a final coat of oil and let it soak into the vulcanite.

I buffed the stem and bowl with Blue Diamond and then gave them both multiple coats of carnauba wax. I buffed them with a clean soft flannel buff to raise the shine and then hand buffed the pipe with a microfibre cloth to finish. The completed pipe is shown below. It has come a long way from the pipe I started on this morning. I had a quiet day at home and between reading and napping finished the work on this old timer. From what I can find out in my research and from Who Made That Pipe, the pipe may well be from the old KBB pipe works. Thanks for looking.