If you want to stick with how you clean your pipes, that's perfectly ok. Men have been cleaning their pipes that way for a very long time. But, if you are curious and an explorer at heart, give it a whirl. I've been doing this since John brought it up on here, and my pipe room doesn't have that nasty ashtray smell, my pipes are always fresh, and the briar and stems are always immaculate. I really haven't had to do a deep clean in a long time. Yeh, sometimes I just don't have the time and I just run a pipecleaner through them and return them to the rack. But, after the next smoke, I just run water, paper towel, and a couple of pipe cleaners and it is better than deep cleaned.
I also had a Bjarne plateau dublin that was getting swollen at the mortise where the stem goes in. The stem was starting to get loose, and I was afraid I was going to have to band it. And, it just wasn't a design that would look good with a band. But, after smoking it for a few months and washing it with water, it's all back to the way it was when I came home with it. It's like the rinsing and wiping down un-swelled the mortise or something.
But, it goes back to a post that I made when I first got here. We had a guy come into the Briary lounge with a story about dropping his favorite pipe into the water while fishing, with grand gestures and looks of defeat. You could tell that he had told this story for decades.
I, wondering what the big deal was, asked, "so what then?"
The guy said, "the pipe got wet..." and gestured like that should be enough.
"What did the water do to it?"
"It was wet, when a pipe gets wet, it's dead."
"Why is it dead? Does it break apart?"
"No, you idiot, when you drop a pipe into the water, it's over. It's just not usable any more."
I turned to the room and shrugged, "why can you not smoke a pipe that has gotten wet?"
"Because when a pipe gets wet, it's dead you idiot."
I'm just an idiot, because for the life of me, I am not sure why a pipe is dead when it gets wet. Was it alive before? My dumbass smokes his pipe in the pool, The beach, the rain, the hot tub, and the shower all the time. I've dropped pipes into the river while fishing, and I wash them out with water. I'm just too frugal to throw them away once they've been wet. Maybe I just like dead pipes. YMMV. :
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