exploring the art of tobacco pipe restoration
I missed last Friday’s post so I thought I’d push this one out a bit early. Posts will be spread out a bit over the next lonthnor so to give me time to work on the Brigham book. I hope their quality makes up for the lack of quantity! – Charles Not long ago, I…
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I’m switching things up this week. Instead of a pipe restoration, I thought you might enjoy a sneak peek at some content from the Brigham pipes book. In this blog, we’re going to take a closer look at Brigham Patent Era pipes, those made between 1938 and 1955. 1938 was a big year for Brigham…
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This pipe is another one of those that has been languishing in my refurb box for quite some time – long enough that I can’t remember exactly when or where I acquired it! High time to give it some attention. Here is how the pipe looked when I brought it to the worktable. It was…
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I have had this late-1960s or very early 1970s Brigham 3044 Oversize Billiard in my box of refurbs for at least the last year if not longer. I’ve checked on it several times over that period, but I’ve never been able to tackle the work it needed until now. The problem has not been a…
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This pipe came to me in a large mixed lot of estates for repair. It is an attention-commanding fist-sized chunk of briar carved into an equally commanding bulldog figural pipe. As you will see in this series of shots taken when I first brought the pipe to the worktable, the briar was in pretty good…
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The work on this pipe has been started and stopped several times over the last few months, repeatedly sidelined in favour of more pressing repair jobs. It’s been so long, in fact, since I started working on it that it took me quite a while to find (most of) the pictures. This series of pics…
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I recently wrote about replacing a broken tenon and called it one of the most common pipe repairs. Today’s post is about another – a cracked shank. For many pipes, a cracked shank can be easily and permanently repaired by installing a shank band over the damaged briar. An external band like this is essentially…
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Amid all the work I’ve been doing on other people’s pipes lately, I try to squeeze in one of my own where I can. This Brigham 206 has been waiting patiently for a little love for quite a while, so I decided that it was time to give it some attention. The series of pictures…
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Tenon and shank repairs are often the bread and butter of pipe repair techs, and understandably so – the tenon is usually the weakest part of a pipe and can be easily damaged accidentally. That was the case with the subject of today’s post, a striking Le Nuvole pipe in a shape I have dubbed…
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I’ve worked a lot on other people’s pipes lately, so thought it was high time I cleaned up an estate from my own box of Refurbs-in-Waiting. In this post I am working on a pretty Jobey Virgin Prime 345 in a Bent Pot Sitter shape. As you can see from this series of pics, the…
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