A Major Salvage Operation for a Gourd Calabash Churchwarden

The Gourd Calabash pipe originated in South Africa, quickly becoming popular among British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand soldiers stationed there during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War. There is a larger Canadian connection here, too, as it was H.L. Blatter, his brother Ernest and sister Marguerite that founded a company to manufacture Gourd Calabash pipes in Cape Town. This family later emigrated to Canada and founded the pipe-making dynasty that is now Blatter Pipes in Montreal, Quebec.

After the war, returning soldiers brought the Gourd Calabash pipes back to their home countries, where their superb smoking qualities quickly led to a surge in demand. The rest, as they say, is history! For more on the origins of the Gourd Calabash pipe, see this article on SmokingPipes.com. The popularity of the Gourd Calabash continues, partly due to the Hollywood invention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes seen smoking one in the films made in the 1930s and 1940s.

The pipe on the bench today was perhaps a bit too popular with its steward. When it arrived at DadsPipes, this once elegant smoking instrument was in a truly sorry state. As this series of images shows, the meerschaum bowl had broken into five or six pieces at some point and had been pasted back together with what appeared to be Plaster of Paris, then pasted to the top of the gourd. The bottom half of the bowl was lodged in the top of the gourd body, while the space around and below it was packed solid with tars and debris. There was so much gunk built up inside the gourd that the pipe was literally weeping tar. A long churchwarden stem had been fitted to the shank, but the fit was poor, causing the stem to fall out if the pipe was turned over.

Before I did anything else, I needed to see if it was even possible to clear the body of the gourd of all the goodies blocking up the inside of the pipe. I unscrewed the plastic shank extension from the narrow neck of the gourd, then started carving out the blockage from the wide end with my pen knife. The lighter coloured stuff in the pics below is the remains of the meerschaum bowl, completely saturated by tars. It was very soft and surrendered to the knife easily. The darker debris is the buildup of tars and bits of tobacco drawn down into the gourd during use. As you can see, there was a lot of it in there, completely obstructing the airway for almost the entire length of the gourd.

This pic shows the gourd body after scraping out all of the detritus. Surprisingly, the original cork gasket was worn but intact.

The remaining parts of the pipe were easy to clean using cotton swabs, pipe cleaners and 99% isopropyl alcohol.

I then did something I never do, and in fact advise against doing. I gave the gourd body an alcohol treatment to mitigate the smell of sour tobacco tars emanating from the pipe. In normal circumstances, I would avoid using a lot of alcohol inside the gourd as it can cause the gourd to soften and distort. This, however, was as far from a routine cleaning as one can get, so I packed in some cotton balls at both open ends of the gourd and added alcohol until the cotton in the shank began dripping.

I propped the body of the pipe upright in an old egg carton to sit while the alcohol did its work. When I came back to the pipe the next day, the alcohol had mostly evaporated, trapping the tars in the cotton balls. These I removed and threw away before setting the pipe aside once again to air out completely over a few days.

While I waited for the gourd to dry out and a replacement meerschaum bowl to arrive by mail, I had a closer look at the shank fitment and the churchwarden stem. A quick measurement or two with the calipers showed why the stem was so loose – the mortise was almost a quarter of a millimetre larger than the stem tenon. That doesn’t sound like a big difference, but when the stem relies on a friction fit to stay mounted to the pipe two tenths of a millimetre may as well be a mile.

Thankfully, this was an easy fix. I simply cut off the undersized tenon and replaced it with a new Delrin tenon of the correct diameter. Gluing the new tenon into the stem face was a bit tricky, but I managed to get the pipe firmly held in my vise while the epoxy cured.

With the pipe clean and ready for its new meerschaum bowl, I smeared a bit of petroleum jelly around the cork gasket. This rehydrates the cork, making it pliable again. This bit of “give” in the cork is what holds the bowl in place, so periodic maintenance is a good thing.

Similarly, I wiped the exterior of the cleaned gourd with mineral oil to replace the moisture the alcohol treatment had removed. I allowed the oil to sit on the gourd briefly, then hand buffed it with a clean towel to remove the excess.

After what turned out to be a long search and a bit of a wait for delivery, the new meerschaum bowl arrived at the shop. These bowls are sold in a variety of sizes, but inevitably, it seems, they arrive either a hair small or a hair too large. In this case, the bowl was very close to perfectly sized but the old cork gasket was too degraded to hold the bowl in place, so it needed to be replaced. My apologies for the lack of photos at this stage. By the time the new meerschaum bowl arrived, the pipe had been in the shop for nearly a month and I was keen to get it on its way home to its steward.

I used a knife to gently scrape out the remains of the old gasket, then cut a long thin slice of cork tile from which I would make a new gasket.

Once trimmed to length, I used wood glue to install the new strip of cork to the inside rim of the gourd. A handful of small clamps held it in position while the glue dried.

As you can likely tell by the pic above the new cork gasket was considerably thicker than the old one. I used a sanding drum mounted to my rotary tool to shave away the cork in small increments, testing the fit with the meerschaum bowl until I achieved a snug but not too snug fit. I finished off this restoration by conditioning the new cork gasket with some petroleum jelly, then reassembled the pipe and took a few final pictures.

This Gourd Calabash Churchwarden was too large to fit comfortably in my light box for final photos, but I managed to take a couple of decent pics. The finished pipe is barely recognizable as the sad thing that had come into the shop a few weeks before. It is once again clean, whole, and the churchwarden stem fits properly in the shank mortise. This Gourd Calabash will never be a clencher, but it should serve its steward well for many years to come, with a little care and feeding along the way.

This project was definitely a labour of love, but the end results speak for themselves, I think. I’m glad I was able to return a much-loved pipe to useful service. I hope you enjoyed watching the transformation.

Until next time, Happy Piping! Here’s the finished pipe.