exploring the art of tobacco pipe restoration
This week’s estate pipe restoration is the fitting of a new stem to a Hardcastle’s Seaton Billiard stummel, which came to me as part of a large lot of pipes for repair. As this series of pics shows, the stummel was in very good, if not unsmoked, condition. It had clearly been without a stem…
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I was temporarily between projects the other day so I dug down to the bottom of my refurb box and came out with an old, well worn Canadian stummel. I brought it to the table and snapped this series of pics. Judging by the cleanliness of the chamber, I’ll suggest that this stummel was never…
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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 pipe on the worktable today is a good example of how Brigham made good use of old stock left over from discontinued product lines. I think this practice was very much in line with Herb Brigham’s penchant for tinkering with pipe shapes and his son Michael’s focus on efficiency and cost-savings in the 1980s.…
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Most often when I am sent a pipe to work on there are physical issues to deal with – a damaged stem, cracked shank, heat fissures, etc. This Bertram pipe is one of the exceptions to this rule. This time I was asked to make changes to the pipe to better suit the preferences of…
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Sourcing the correct materials to restore vintage pipes is a constant task, and one made more complicated as the years go by. The youngest of the Canadian-made Brigham pipes are now nearly 20 years old, production having shifted to France and Italy in 2001. At about the same time the original aluminum tenon/filter holders were…
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This pipe belongs to a fellow Ontario piper and DadsPipes reader who wrote to me asking what could be done to get this older meerschaum Egg back into his rotation. At first glance, the pipe looked to be in good shape, but a closer inspection revealed that the stem had been damaged at the button…
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Welcome to Part III of this series about a “lost” line of unfiltered Brigham pipes. This time, I’m working on the second of two Brigham “Canuck” prototype pipes circa 1940s or 1950s. As I wrote about in Part I, the Canuck line was produced until the 1960s. Production pipes were fitted with a non-filtered Vulcanite…
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Today’s pipe is an interesting dive into the history books. I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I did! I’ve had this John’s Silver Mount pipe in my refurb box for some time but rediscovered it just before Christmas when I was sorting through things in the shop. The stamps are rather worn,…
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