A Few Antique Meerschaums Back From The Pipe Hospital!

The great day finally arrived when a phone call from Tim West at L H Lowe announced that after a year and a half he had finished the work on some of my 'walking wounded' meerschaum pipes and was ready to ship them to me. Firstly the results speak for themselves as the man is a true genius and one of only two pipe repairers in the meerschaum space I would recommend, the other being Ric down at Briarville. When you are dealing with 120+ plus year old pipes you do not want your pipes repaired by Rube Goldberg as I had a 'cutty' pipe enhanced once when a someone thought it was a brilliant idea to change the dynamics of one of my pipes by grinding off its foot, in essence that chap castrated my poor pipe! Suffice to say I have never sent this gentleman another one of my pipes to work on again!
Most of the pipes shown here are the 12' variety of 'cutty' pipes that I have really stopped buying over the last few years as they are a little difficult to smoke whilst walking down the street and are fragile. In the last year or so I have been focusing on the 6 1/2 " traditional 'cutty' as these are more convenient for carrying around and smoking outdoors in beer gardens and such like during the summer months. The 12" pipes are very good for indoor smoking whilst working in the office but since I have so many of these pipes I think in the future I will be have a little sale of these so interested parties do PM me if you want to own a genuine Condorlover1 meerschaum pipe!
The first pipe is a delightful 7" 'cutty' and you can see by the 'cant' of the pipe the style is certainly a mirror image of the popular mid 1870s clay pipe that is commonly found as a broken fragment all around the UK on Victorian rubbish dumps and on the Thames foreshore. This one has had a reinforced silver band added along with a new stem with the bone tenion opened out for better air flow and draw. It has colored well over the last century with a fair amount of color added by my heavy consumption of black twist and Condor Plug through this pipe.

The next one is a 12" straw with case probably French from the late 1880s with original amber stem that has had a silver band added and the damaged threads repaired and made good. This pipe shows all the hall marks of the classic French Parisian pipe makers style. I don't know who made this pipe but the bowl size is certainly of the ilk that you can fill the pipe on a Sunday and smoke it all week.

Here was the picture I was trying to upload before the system timed itself out!

This last pipe is one of the common 12" 'cutty' pipes that show up for sale quite often in that it has a short amber bit and a very long meerschaum stem. They usually surface quite frequently on Ebay with the threading on the pipes shank usually well and truly buggered through careless dismantling during cleaning. In the days before multiple sized pipe cleaners are the norm a feather or a length of wire and a bit of rag was more often than not employed in the weekly cleaning activities. This one had a silver three pence well an truly cemented into the bottom of the bowl that I had to drill out and then very gently extract with a cork screw revealing about 100 years of crud underneath the coin. You can see Tim West has re threaded the stem and made a new faux amber mouth piece for the pipe and again improved the airway.

You can see large chunks of my extensive collection on here posted over the last few years - to post everything would be impossible as you are asking for 30+ years with on average 2 new pipes acquired every other month or so. There are some large group shots of twenty of so of my pipes together on here somewhere and also I can let you take a walk around my photo bucket if you would like that plus there is my blog that deals with these types of pipes. Any reason for your interest? Interested minds would like to know unless you are a pipe burglar! :rofl:

Thank you it does indeed take a lot of work. I should post a picture of one of mine after being bashed around on Black Twist for a year or so to give you a before and after comparison. What I have found is the screens from the head shops placed at the bottom of the bowl work like an absolute treat!

How do you think they got to be that color in the first place Peck? I am starting to wonder what extensive exposure to War Horse will do to a meerschaum. As our tobacco version of the 'Manhattan Project' moves to its conclusion with the creation of the War Horse 1 oz plug I will be even more interested to see what sort of an impact that will have on a meerschaum pipe. As an after thought how did you find the W.H RR sample? More fun than rubbing yourself? :rofl:

Here is an example of the coloring process on a meerschaum which shows what can be achieved without bathing the pipe in bees wax and simply relying on the absorbent qualities of the meerschaum to soak up the tar and oils.


The second picture is the same pipe ten months after the first picture was taken with a replacement stem from Ric @ Briarworks after the old stem gave up the ghost.

Tim's work is amazing. He does take his time but the wait is well worth it, the same applies to Ric down at Briarville. Strangely enough Tim kindly acted as the guinea pig for SToP to test out the early batches of Bengal Slices as it was his go to blend back in the day!