Coloring Your Ancient Meerschaum

People often ask me how I get my pipes the color they are and I usually respond that they are that color through about a century of shit getting smoked in them!  The reality of the situation is that I have fathomed out over the years how our forbears actually achieved this amazing two tone color scheme. If you look at the pipe below this will illustrate exactly the point I am making.

Some of you may of read articles about meerschaum 'Coloring Bowls' which are similar to the bowl that fits into a calabash pipe but simply are designed to fit into the top of a meerschaum pipe. It simply creates a chamber that fills up with moisture and tar that the pipe absorbs and it results in the pipe taking on the desirable traits associated with an antique meerschaum pipe. Others simply slather their pipes with beeswax and achieve a similar but more often darker result with the aid of a hair dryer and a cotton wool bud. The question is how did Joe Q Lunch Box achieve the results we see in the very old meerschaum pipes that sometimes come to the market today?

The answer is surprisingly simple. Over the years I have purchased pipes and as I have cleaned out all of the crud in the bowl I noticed that most seemed to have either a button drilled with a couple of holes or a silver sixpence which was a very small pre-decimal British coin that represented half of a shilling with a couple of small holes drilled into the coin. I used to extract these nuisance obstructions with either a stud puller or a cork screw after carefully cleaning away the carbon deposit that had cemented this heirloom into the bottom of the bowl. One day I was at a classic bike race meeting and I mentioned this a very old boy who smoked a pipe and he smiled riley at me me and then explained the reason. People put these items at the bottom of their pipe to create a miniature air chamber similar to a calabash or a 'Coloring Bowl' so that the pipe absorbed all the crud from the tobacco thus coloring the stem and the base of the pipe. Also in an age before pipe cleaners when you cleaned your pipe with a feather it stopped the stem getting blocked up with fragments of tobacco.

This got me thinking after I have pointed out this story to numerous people on forums over the years about how a similar system could be replicated for today. We don't have any silver coins in the US and a dime is far too big to sit snuggly at the base of a bowl and besides who wants to smoke through something that contains nickel and heaven knows what else. The solution is to take a trip to your local Head Shop and buy a packet of the gauzes fitted to a hash pipe. If you carefully trim one of these you can get it to sit neatly at the bottom of the bowl so that it creates an air space of 1/8th of an inch. By smoking the pipe and leaving this gauze coin in place it will have the exact same effect as achieved by our Victorian friends and color the lower bowl and stem over a month or so of active smoking as well as preventing stem blockage and damage from the less then intelligent of our number trying to ram a pipe cleaner down a small hole and breaking an antique stem or worse.

Buying a Meerschaum Cutty Part 3

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

I assume by this stage you have carried out all the operations that I have laid out in parts 1 & 2 and you have done all of these without breaking the pipe or damaging anything. We now come to the subject of scraping the bowl as opposed to scraping the bottom of the barrel! For this job you will now need the services of a good iron bladed pen knife - see below



Take the pipe bowl in your left hand, firstly remembering to leave the pipe cleaner in the pipe slightly protruding into the bottom of the bowl. Do not do this while holding the stem as it will snap and remember the pipe cleaner is in there to stop all the sh*t going down the pipes airway. Put the blade into the bowl flat but at a 45% angle and scrape around the bowl 1/32 below the rim. Tap the bowl over some toilet paper and slant the bowl towards the light and with the top 1/4 inch of the blade scrape around the middle of the bowl and repeat this process until you reach the bottom. Some pipes often have very heavy build up sometimes greater than 1/16" and this will come off at the top of the bowl in large pieces with the rest having to be very gently chipped away using the point of the knife. If that is the case go very slowly and scrape the bowl after each successive carbon deposit removal until all the carbon and clinker has been extracted. It is very important this is done as this stuff heats and expands at a faster rate than meerschaum and has the potential to crack the bowl if not dealt with promptly.

Once this has been achieved wipe out the bowl with a damp cloth and then gently with another clean damp rag wipe off and polish the bowl. Remember never use spirits or anything else on the outside of a meerschaum as any finger prints or historical marks are there for good and cannot be removed. I now want to talk about bees wax and waxing your pipe. Many people recommend this and if you feel like dismantling your pipe and warming it up on a stove to slather it with pure bees wax by all means do so. It will turn the pipe a brown color but I have always felt like it is cheating and defeats the object of buying an older pipe. Also remember if you use too much wax it will leech out of the meerschaum and give your tobacco a very interesting taste that will take many smokes to get rid off and you may find you will get better results with a coloring bowl but then the choice is yours.

I am often asked what type of tobacco will color my pipe quickly. Well the short answer is there isn't one as its a factor of how much you smoke your pipe. Unlike briar pipes meerschaums do not need to be rested so you can smoke them for days on end and providing the bowl is scraped once a week and you put the correct pipe cleaner down the stem you can get by with smoking the same pipe every day. You all know I smoke Condor Plug or twist which is what was traditionally consumed in this type of pipe but then anything with a reasonable moisture content will suffice over time to turn the pipe brown.

I hope you have found this article both informative and helpful.

Foot Notes:

Rick Farrah can be found at www.briarville.com
Tim West can be found at J H Lowe
Both of these fellows do excellent work on old meerschaum pipes and I am sure there are others but these are ones I have used and recommend.

Buying a Meerschaum Cutty Part 2

The package has arrived. You have torn open the wrapper and wrestled with the miles of taped up bubble wrap and finally you are confronted with a pipe case containing a meerschaum pipe that hopefully has cost you under $100.

The first thing I recommend is that your examine the pipe carefully to make sure everything aligns and that the stem is a reasonably tight fit, looks for cracks on the shank or anywhere else and note them down. Do not attempt to remove the stem from the shank in any way as this could lead to problems later on. I would recommend gently blowing down the stem to check that the air ways are not blocked. Once that has been achieved insert a soft pipe cleaner of the variety used in modeling down the stem. The first cleaning of the stem should be warm water with a slight hint of washing up liquid. The second cleaning should be achieved by the use of a dry pipe cleaner to remove any residual moisture. I cannot stress to you the importance of using soft modeling pipe cleaners, if you use any of the commercially available 'bristle' type cleaners you will damage the stem or the 'button' by trying to force something into a small space thus over stressing the material.

Once you have accomplished the above straight forward task I recommend you take another pipe cleaner and insert it into the pipe and leave it in there whilst we deal with the subject of bowl cleaning. Prior to carrying out all the prescribed operations enumerated in paragraph one it is advisable to clean out any loose tobacco or residue in the bowl. It is at the point you may run into one of the following things (i) a butt plug (ii) silver or copper button or silver Three Pence if you are very lucky. Both of these will be at the base of the bowl and if you have never come across one before I will explain to you exactly what they are designed to achieve. The pictures below should help you visualize what I am talking about here.







You will see from the above pipes that one is deeply colored half way down the bowl and along the shank whilst the first example is just starting to color. In the third picture you will see the famous 'butt plug' which was a device thought by the Victorians to prevent tobacco matter from blocking up the stem. In reality it acted like a coloring bowl which I am sure you have come across in discussion threads about meerschaum pipes on the various forums. In essence this is a device that fits into the bowl of a meerschaum and is loaded with tobacco and if used causes the pipe to change color be collecting and condensing all the tars and moisture at the bottom of the pipes bowl so that it can be absorbed by the meerschaum. If you find one of the plugs at the bottom of your meerschaum use a very thin and sharp bladed knife to scrape away any build up or very fine sand paper so that the edges of the plug are visible and with a little patience and a gentle tap against the palm the hand the plug should fall out.

Interestingly enough I saw hundreds of these plugs and broken clay pipes when some renovation work was being done on my local pub back home so they must have been like the cigarette butt of yesteryear!  The other item you might encounter is the silver three penny bit or silver button these were also put in the bottom of the pipe to act if like as a primitive coloring bowl. As in the figure (i) follow the same procedure although I have found the best method after scraping around the bowl is to use a cork screw to extract these annoying obstructions. I have even found the copper version of a Levi Denim button used as a coloring device which was removed before the copper content started leeching into the meerschaum.

Having now dealt with all the fun stuff we come down to bowl scraping which I will deal with in part 3 of the article since I have to buzz off to work right now!

Buying a Meerschaum Cutty

You have won the Oi Vay auction or purchased the pipe from that other site called Itchy. You have paid for your purchase by money or credit card and the day has finally arrived when you receive that well wrapped package containing your pipe.

Well before that day even gets here lets start with the questions you should pose to any seller before you even part with any cash. Some can usually be answered by just studying the pictures but here are the main ones. (i) Is the case in good order? Does the case snap shut or is it missing any of the locking furniture? Does the case have hinges or are any of the hinges missing or hanging off, held on by one nail? Remember even I have been unable to find a competent case repairer since at least 1991 and to the best of my knowledge they do not exist unless someone would like to prove me wrong. (ii) Early meerschaum pipes, by which I mean anything made before 1910 will have a double headed screw that is know as a 'tenion' which will screw into the pipes shank and the stem is screwed onto the seated and protruding threaded part.

This is where things become tricky as the shanks of these pipes were threaded and careless maintenance, stupidity etc can cause these threads to wear so that the 'tenion' is no longer seated in the shank or will rotate or can be removed by just pulling the stem. This in itself is not a deal breaker as any competent Meerschaum repairman such as Ric at Briarville or Tim at J H Lowe can fix these issues by rebuilding the treads. (iii) The next issue is does the stem line up with the 'tenion' and the shank? Most pre-1910 meerschaum 'cutty' pipes had slightly tapered either amber or faux amber stems with a slightly oval button on the end. Due to wear once the stem is screwed into the 'tenion' more often or not the stem will not align properly. Again this is not a deal breaker since a gasket of thicker paper will normally provide the necessary lift for the stem to align properly.




The example above shows the correct stem alignment and tapering with the all to common late Victorian reinforcing ring either added to a damaged shank or sometimes added for for decorative effect. In part 2 I will tell you all you need to know about what to do the minute you open the box and stuff your new friend with tobacco!