African Meerschaum Coloring

[gmwolford]

The last couple of days I have been waxing my two meerschaum pipes, a Turkish block and an African one. In this thread I have been posting progress photos of my Storient bulldog I got for Christmas last year. I also discussed how I did the waxing, etc, answering a few questions that were posed to me.
I thought I'd share before and after pics of the African block here, in a different thread.
Before

After waxing

As you can see, there isn't much change in this one. It was an estate pipe I got an an antique store in TN last fall and had already colored, either naturally or by "process", I don't know. Anyway, it didn't make much (any?) difference in the color of the pipe, the waxing, which I did solely by rubbing while smoking it, foregoing the q-tip treatment the Storient got. But it did bring back a nice even shine to the pipe.

 

[eazye77]

That is a sweet pipe sir.

 

[voorhees]

Now I know why you thought mine was African. That is a beautiful pipe.

 

[gmwolford]

Thank you eazye77 and Voorhees. I figured once you saw my African you'd see why I jumped to that conclusion on your LVC. :wink:

 

[redbeard]

Funny how the African colors all the way to the stem but your other seems to stop where the stem ends inside. I'm sorry, I don't have the technical terms down yet ::

 

[Briar Boy]

I have several african meers, they definitely take much longer to color due to their density, I usually only wax my meers about every 6 months and I don't usually wax the Africans, here is my most colored african meer which I got as an estate pipe and did wax, the previous owner smoked the heck out of it to get this much color, you will get the best results from the submersion method, slowly melting the wax at low heat in a pot, corking the bowl & shank and dipping the pipe into the melted wax repeatedly, wipe off excess wax before it hardens, let cool and polish to a high shine with a soft cloth (best for smooth pipes) a hair dryer can be used to melt wax out of intricately carved crevices...

 

[gmwolford]

astrange1, thats a neat pipe.

 

[bentmike]

Looks good Greg! I like how the pipe has a matching color gradient at the rim and end of the shank where it joins the stem.

 

[pipedreamer]

nice pipe almost looks like porcelain

 

[pipedreamer]

nice pipe almost looks like porcelain