@georged , must to tell you, referring to my own and friends experience, here all across the Eu continent we still have few pipe repair shops remaining in operation and, what i can tell you no of them will give a damn' to customer special requests,you got your pipe back and it functions, thats it, the repair itself might have been performed impeccably or satisfactorily depending on the mood and willingness of that particular repair dude
I think that most of the time it's simply a matter of profitability/business viability.
Anything that involves creating a precision object by hand---jewelry, fountain pens, knives, and pipe repair are all good examples---has a "return on investment" rule regarding effort.
A minimally acceptable result is around 80%. Halving the distance to perfection---reaching 90%---requires a doubling of that effort. Halving the distance again to 95% requires another doubling, still again to reach 97.5%, and so on. (The rule never ends since perfection is impossible to achieve, so things usually stop at "virtual" perfection.)
A good example is the Japanese
katana sword. Functional ones can be found at swap meets for a few hundred dollars. The world's best specimens are produced by teams who have a specialist for every step of the process, require many hundreds of man-hours of labor, and cost a half-million dollars or more.
True high grade pipe repair is a new concept. Until the Scandanavian solo artist makers started raising the execution bar in the late 80s/early 90s to previously unimagined heights, there were no pipe collectors in today's sense of the term. There were pipe
accumulators, to be sure, but since factory workmanship focused on functionality, so did repair work. And that was OK. It was expected. (Some brands were better than others, but even the best were still mass produced. i.e. made under time pressure.)
When the new Scandinavian marvels got damaged, though, their owners weren't satisfied with mass-production-class repair work, and they discovered most uber grade carvers didn't
DO repair work. (It's a vastly different thing than creating pipes in the first place... the tools, materials, techniques, and mind-set have very little overlap.)
A few people crazy enough to "go there" then filled that void.
An unintended side effect of the Scandanavian Awakening was that after collectors knew what was possible, some of them wanted the same standard applied to
all their damaged pipes, even the factory made ones. They wanted "invisible" instead of detectable repairs.
Which brings things back around to business viability. Where a $200 exact-copy stem for a multi-thousand-dollar Bo Nordh is a no-brainer, the same amount of effort (expense) to save a vastly less valuable GBD, Dunhill, or Barling isn't asked for often enough for a "functional fix" shop to worry about. They see a hundred normal customers for every hardcore collector, and can get along just fine by doing what they've done for generations: Use molded stems, grind shanks to level, approximate color matches, and so on.
Where things get messy is when one of those hardcore collectors wants high grade repair work and either can't locate one of the few shops capable of it---the low demand means there are only a small number of them---or
thinks he has found one and discovers after the pipe is returned that it wasn't the case.
And here we are. My apologies an behalf of my repair brethren, Paulie. It sounds like things in Europe are especially tough.
