Waxing Your Old Girl!

I have read on many forums about how people slather their pipes in bees wax, even using a small paint brush. After each coat of melted bees wax some people recommended blasting your pipe with the wife's hair dryer and then polishing off the wax. On a couple of forums people have posted quite detailed instructions about this whole process and the resulting pipes look like they have been soaked in an ash tray of old dottles of Warrior plug and hot water!

Before I start passing judgement on the process I thought I would test out these various theories on a surplus to requirement early 1920s French meerschaum 'cutty' that had a hairline crack in the bowl so it was buggered for all intents and purposes. Firstly I smoked the pipe non stop for about a week with a mixture of finely cut black twist and Condor plug which resulted in minimal color changes and the predictable rim burn. I then disassembled and cleaned the pipe and put the amber stem in the case so that it didn't get lost or sat on.

Next I fed a long soft pipe cleaner through the bowl and out through the shank so that the bowl could be supported during the warming process. I acquired through my good friend David Shain in Georgia a half pound of pure bees wax as his friend keeps bees or may be secretly is running an S&M establishment but I think it highly unlikely.  I then warmed the pipe bowl up using a hair dyer and then carefully wiped all the crud and build up off the stem using a soft cotton cloth. Next I rubbed very gently over the hot stem the new clean bees wax and the continued to heat the stem with the hair dryer. Once the stem had received an even coating I set the bowl aside to cool down. After about thirty minutes I repeated the process again and kept the stem warm and then I polished the stem with a clean soft cotton cloth.

What was the result? Well it polished up the meerschaum quite nicely and removed some of the dirt and crud from the outside but that was about it. I did detect some very slight change in color but nothing to write home about. I will now run a whole bunch of tobacco through the pipe over the next week or so and see what changes if any take place. I have a feeling that the tried and tested Victorian method of using a silver coin or 1 Euro Cent piece with holes drilled in it will be far more successful. Thanks to my good friend Frank over in the Fatherland (Germany) I have a supply of suitably defaced Euro cent coins for the next stage of this experiment.

As you can see from the picture not a whole lot happened when I waxed the 'old girl' so we will now do it the traditional way with coin at the bottom. This should get the same result as using a Coloring Bowl without having to turn your pipe into something that resembles the smoke stack of a mid 19th century steam train. Watch this space for further developments.....

Crap You Find Stuck in Meerschaum Pipe Bowls!

I have commented on 'butt plugs' which are the things you find in the bottom of old pipes, more often then not meerschaum 'cutty' pipes from the late 19th century through to the early 20th century. They are normally defined as some form of artificial obstruction deliberately placed at the bottom of the bowl to (i) assist in the coloring of the meerschaum and thus acting as a primitive form coloring bowl (ii) a way of stopping the finely drilled stems from becoming clogged with tobacco fragments and other forms of dendrites.

Elsewhere here and on my own own blog I have commented that it is not unusual to encounter silver buttons, silver three penny pieces to name just a few items I have pulled out of pipe bowls. I have not idea if the silver has some form of reactive quality that assists in the coloring process, I personally suspect not but I am more than happy to be proved wrong by any amateur chemists reading the piece. Below are a few examples of items I have pulled with the aid of a cork screw from the bottom of several ancient meerschaum 'cutty' pipes.

This first example was pulled out of a meerschaum 'cutty' I was cleaning up for a forum member and appears to be a threaded nut with a safely washer added. It was the same diameter as the pipe bowl and since it was tapered it formed a hollow void beneath the burning tobacco that assisted in the coloring of the pipe. As you can see from the picture below the effect has been to concentrate all the coloring of the meerschaum from the bottom third of the bowl and the shank. Since this pipe came without a stem and is currently undergoing a refit with Ric at Briarville the new owner will have to decide how patient he wants to be with coloring the rest of the pipe.

Here is another shot of this nasty obstruction.

The most common obstruction to run into is the old metal button either made from silver or whatever else was on hand at the time. Usually these items have been filed down slightly and seem to be popular as they have been pre-drilled thus creating an easy way for the pipe to draw whilst being smoked. Again they also form a void or chamber below the burning tobacco for tar and moisture to build up which accelerates the coloring process of the bottom third of the bowl and the shank. If you shake the pipe you will often hear the rattle of 'clinker' and all the other dried crap that has built up in the bottom of the pipe over the last 100+ years. Here are a couple of examples and should you run into anything like these they can again be removed with a cork screw and a little bit of patience without any harm befalling your pipe although do scrape with a blade well around the obstruction before extraction.

The final item you may encounter is the porcelain 'butt plug' although they tend to be pretty rare. They come in two varieties (i) absorbent clay (ii) fired ceramic. Which ever one you come across I have found these to be the most problematic obstructions to remove from an antique pipe. Once you have cleaned and scraped around the obstruction the only thing you can do with these fellows is to use a 'shim' to remove all the concretion and build up around the edges of the obstruction and then hope for the best or hand the whole thing over to your professional pipe man. Strangely enough you can find these things kicking around in the gardens of most Victorian pubs along with endless clay pipe shards as they seem to have been cheap and frequently discarded. Here is the only picture I have of one of these things and it is interesting to note the veins that allow for the smoke to be drawn through the whole construct thus creating the space that is today served by a coloring bowl.

 In part two I will answer the age old question regarding what we use for a modern day replacement to achieve the same effect with a meerschaum pipe so tune in again soon!