Dunhill ODA 838 (straight squat bulldog) Restoration (pic heavy)

There are Dunhill collectors, Dunhill ODA collectors, and Dunhill ODA's-of-a-specific-shape collectors.
The last sort are definitely lifers, because there aren't many ODA's in the world to begin with, and finding a specimen of every finish within a specific shape number isn't easy. To find a full set of one the scarcest shapes in the ODA range borders on masochistic.
The pipe in this thread was sent to me by one of those guys. :lol: (If he were an athlete he'd want to run the Leadville 100 or climb Mount Everest, I imagine.)
How rarity collectors tend to do it is by filling their collection with whatever they can find, and then never stop playing King of the Hill, swapping out weak specimens when stronger ones are found.
Dunhill's 838 in the Root finish is a right little piggy in that regard, though, being infamously elusive. Never mind trading up, finding one for sale in pretty much any condition is a rare enough event that you grab first and deal with its issues later.
And here we are. This one had a poorly-made replacement stem (even the dot wasn't round... how's that even possible?!), and the rim had been rounded over at some point with sandpaper and refinished, presumably to remove knock damage. The nomenclature had also suffered from the heavy-handed re-stem (some shaving to achieve level had taken place) and possibly from the rounded rim re-finish (if the entire stummel had been sanded to make the stain color matching easier.)
So, the two main issues with this piece just happened to be what are (by a considerable margin) to two most challenging things to achieve in the pipe repair world: Cutting and leveling a geometric/faceted stem with absolutely ZERO shank manipulation allowed because of the faint nomenclature; and getting a perfect color & translucency match of raw wood to an existing finish when ONLY the raw wood can be touched. (If an entire stummel can be re-stained, even slightly, matching is much easier. That's how it's usually done. But not in this case. Simply color-buffing the shank would blitz the nomenclature.)
Anyway, there you have it, and here are the pics. (My apologies in advance to anyone using a slow connection).
The Patient:









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The Process:









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The Result:

As always, thanks for the props, and I'm glad some of you KevinBoarders get a kick out of seeing this stuff. :D One of the biggest frustrations of pipe repair & restoration is that the highest level of achievement---no one being able to tell when work has been done---makes something like having a table at a pipe show pointless. You'd have to have a time machine version of the pre-worked-on pipe alongside the worked-on one before anyone would believe your claims. "The bowl fell off that one and got run over by a bus... really!" :roll:
:lol:
And I've already mentioned that I'm also doing a bit of fishing with this sort of before/process/after thread, hoping that some fountain pen guy or model builder or similar has their interest piqued enough to investigate high grade repair and restoration for themselves. Not gettin' any younger, the me.

I almost bid on a Dunhill LBS on ebay this morning, but it had a hole in the stem, and you told me you it would be about a year before you could make a new stem.

Click to expand...

Getting out from under the Box Pile has been a challenge. As soon as I make significant progress, people use the fact to send more stuff. :lol: "I've been waiting to send this and heard your backlog is better, so figured I'd better jump in while I can, right?"
My apologies, Mike. If I could clone myself I would.
As for the fishing, it isn't hard to find people who think they want to do this. That usually changes when they discover what's involved in terms of tools and supplies, though, and the ramifications of working on other people's property without a rewind button become clear. :?