Everything Old is New Again

When I was a kid my grandmother (Nonna) gave me one of my deceased grandfather's watches. You can probably see where this is going - young boy with an object of great sentimental value. Well, I lost it. You can also probably imagine my dread as I was riding my bike through Bawating field when I realized it was gone. I spent the better part of an hour retracing my tire-tracks and searching that field to no avail. I still get hints of that sinking feeling in my stomach when I think about it.

Well, I was thinking about this the other day when I remembered that I had taken one of Nonno's pipes from Nonna's house and left it sitting on top of my parents fridge forever. I decided that I would try and restore it so I went over there and retrieved it. To restore it I would need to get rid of the charring around the rim, ream out the carbon build-up inside the pipe, buff the bowl and remove the oxidation from the stem.

I figured I should do a trial run before I attempted the real restoration so after a little pipe research, I found a style called the "Canadian". This appealed to me in two ways: 1) I'm Canadian so a style of pipe with that name should be pretty cool and 2) the stem of a Canadian is short compared to other styles (don't tell the ladies, nyuk nyuk) so there wouldn't be as much sanding involved. I managed to find a nice Wally Frank brand sandblasted Canadian from the 50's or 60's for $13 bucks on eBay. The picture doesn't really show the greenish oxidation. You can see it a bit near the silver band:


A nice looking pipe, eh? Here are some shots of the grain:


Good stuff.

I didn't take pics of the process but after watching YouTube videos and reading "how to's" here's what I did.

First I soaked the stem in OxyClean for about 3 hours then used pipe cleaners (yes, they're really for pipes! who knew?) and alcohol (Stolichnaya vodka - most pipe smokers use rum) to clean out the air passage. There was some puss brown crap that came out for a while but now it's spic and span. Then I sanded it with sandpaper (400, 600, 1500 and 2000 grit) left over from my guitar refinishing endeavors. After that it soaked in vodka for a few hours and was pipe-cleaned again. Finally, I used the Dremel set I received as a gift and first buffed in 3M's Finesse It II then Carnauba wax into the stem.

Not a bad job:

It's a good thing I had a test pipe because if you look closely you can see some indentations. This is because I had the Dremel on high speed and instead of buffing, it wore away the vulcanite. My basement smelled of burnt rubber for a while. Laura was not pleased.

On to the main attraction - a London Made "Commander Birks". A Google search of this pipe brand turned up nothing. I think the shape is called an "Apple" with a "saddle bit" stem.

This is the only pic I have as a before shot. I had already begun the sanding process but you can see the original colour of the stem at the wide section with the tiny "B" on it as I had yet to sand that part.


And here's the final product. Pretty freakin' good, eh? Now you can see the reflection of the screen in it where before it was a dull sickly green colour. Cool.


Here's a shot of the bowl after I buffed it with Carnauba wax:


This is a pic to show the nice grain on the pipe:

This isn't a pipe that would go for big bucks on eBay (you can see the pits in the pics above and the spit and elbow grease didn't really remove the charring from the rim - not pictured) but it does have a lot of sentimental value and I can guarantee you it won't be lost in Bawating field.