The bad thing about buying pipes in antique/collectible shops, flea markets and street fair, is the funky smell in the pipes. I don’t know if the vendors just pipes stored for 10 years in a box filled with dirty socks but they stink. I have actually declined to buy a pipe because it smelled so bad. Yes, I sniff the bowl when I’m examining pipes. And, yes, you can tell if something other than tobacco has been smoked in a tobacco pipe. This pipe smelled liked old burley based OTC blends and grandma’s bath powder.
Cleaning and polishing the stem
In the meantime, I soaked the stem in an Oxyclean solution for an hour to raise the oxidation. I could have skipped this step because the stem wasn’t too bad, but, I like softening up the tar buildup in the airway. This makes it easier to clean using a bristle cleaner and alcohol. Once I can insert the pipe cleaner all the way through and it comes out clean, I start on the outside.
Micro-mesh pads are my friends and I use and abuse them to clean the stem. My pads start at 3200 and incrementally increases up to 12000. I started with a wet 3200 pad for about 30 minutes before moving up to a finer pad. Here’s a tip, step outside into bright sunlight and look at the stem before moving to the next pad. You will see any discoloration better in direct sunlight.
By the time you finish with the 12000-grit micro-mesh pad, the stem should be nice and shiny. I don’t stop there though. I like to take two more steps. First, I coat the stem with Brebbia Pipe Polishing compound and let it dry for at least 30 minutes to an hour before wiping it off with a soft cloth. Second, I use my buffer to add a light coat of carnauba. Finally (yeah, it may be overkill) I apply a thin coat of Obsidian oil. I just like the results I get.
Sanitizing the bowl and airway…
While the stem was soaking, I started the bowl on its first alcohol & cotton ball treatment. Last year I starting using a cotton ball instead of coarse salt because I liked the results better. There are two ways to do this. One is to soak the cotton ball in the alcohol and then carefully insert it into the bowl. The other is to put the dry cotton into the bowl and use an eye dropper to soak it with alcohol. The second method makes it easier to get the alcohol in the bowl without getting it on the outside of the bowl. I then set the bowl upright in a pipe holder and let it soak for overnight or at least 8 hours. Some people recommend 24 hours.
After the first soak, I rinse the bowl and then ream out the cake. Why after? The alcohol softens the carbon and makes it easier to remove. I gently ream the bowl and then wrap sand paper (I like 600 grit for this) around my finger and rub it around the bowl a few times to get closer to the wood. There have been times, where this removes all the ghosts of tobacco past. This wasn’t one of them.
What works for me after the alcohol treatment is a coffee treatment. I pack the bowl – and the airway – with used, damp coffee grounds and then let it sit for at least 8 hours. Between those two methods, I usually get a bowl that smells slightly of coffee. (The smell disappears after the first smoke.) This pipe took two alcohol and one coffee treatment to get rid of the smell.
Restoring the bowl…
The exterior of the bowl was in bad shape. It was dirty. It had adhesive residue from where the vendor taped the price on the bowl. Normally, I just wipe the
bowl with water and wax with carnauba. This time I decided to do more after Irwin told me how light the bowls were originally.
The method I decided on was to scrub it down with 91% isopropyl alcohol and a Magic Eraser before wet sanding with 600-grit sandpaper. Instead of water, I just continually dipped the sandpaper in the alcohol. This did remove quite a bit of the grime and old color the pipe had acquired over the year. From there, like with the stem, I worked my way through finer grit sandpaper and micro-mesh pads. As a final touch I hand polished the bowl with a red Scotch-Brite pad like the ones used for cleaning a ceramic stove top. This gave the bowl a semi-glossy shine before adding carnauba and polishing on the buffer.
One thing I passed on was applying any other finish to the bowl. While it still wasn’t down to bare wood or to the original bowl color, I liked the way the grain appeared. Adding any type of oil finish would darken the wood so I decided to go with just the wax.
The end results.
Four days after purchasing my Peterson Kapp-Royal I was happy with my restoration work and packed it with Peterson’s Founder’s choice for the first bowl. Even though I had removed almost all of the cake from the bowl, it gave me a good smoke that lasted close to an hour.
Special thanks to Mark Irwin at petersonpipenotes and Steve Laug at rebornpipes for their guidance in cleaning my Peterson Kapp-Royal.
Read The Case of the Confused Peterson (Part I)
© J. Gibson Creative Services. August 2018
