I recently gave a friend my only Caminetto pipe and so I was on the search on Ebay for another one. As luck would have it - I got one pretty cheap - $35 bucks - with no bidding from competitors. The main reason no one bid is that it looked filthy and had "Dog" written all over it.
I have had a lot of success of buying "Dogs" and transforming them into attractive smoking pipes. If I can clean 'em - I do so and if there is something out of the kin of hand polishing and cleaning - I send 'em to my pipe fixit guy who has made lots of replacement stems for me and has a buffing wheel.
The Caminetto arrived - I cleaned it up - but the stem - although intact...just didn't work for me. The Caminetto is a KS (King Size) model and the stem was well...like sucking on a shovel. Sooo, I had my pipe fixit guy make a short stem - more than 1/2 the size of the original and curved. The results were awesome! The pipe smokes better -looks better, etc. I call it my "Sawed Off Shotgun Pipe" because of its large bowl and small chunky stem.
While I didn't make the stem - I did supply my pipe fixit guy with a drawing of how I wanted the stem to look - so I feel that my "design/idea" really paid off. Have any of you folks out there made any corrections or modifications to your pipes that paid off? Post them as I love to get ideas and learn things from you.
Here is a picture of my SAWED OFF SHOTGUN PIPE! 
and then I stained her with a natural coat and voila! My first briar looks AWESOME. But now I need to let her air out and dry for a day till I smoke it. But I imagine without the shellac finish it will likely smoke cooler... though I could be wrong.
