Another question about cake.

[dongreyface]

Should I go with white or spice cake? :rofl: Sorry, bad joke. But seriously, one question that has been bothering me on building a cake is if I should be running a pipe cleaner along the inside of the bowl everytime I'm done smoking. It almost seems counter-productive to me to do so as I don't seem to be building any cake what-so-ever on my pipes. Granted they only get smoked once maybe twice a week, so it could just be too slow for me to notice. Should I not put the cleaner into a 'u' and run it along the bowl until I have a cake built?

 

[olderthandirt]

That's exactly what I do with mine and the cake does build, albeit slowly. I prefer this as the cake that does form is uniform, solid and the amount of time involved in the accretion is long enough that reaming is a once in a blue-moon kind of thing.
In short, works very well for me.

 

[schmitzbitz]

I used to spend countless hours lying awake in bed, concerning myself with the best ways to achieve a perfect cake, and all it got me was exhaustion.

That said, having messed around with all sorts of tricks for building a cake faster have resulted in a sloppy, gummy cake. Conversely, dry-reaming a bowl every smoke clears away so much of the gunk that it never has time to harden into anything substantial. These days, when I get a new pipe, I simply load it (to the top, too), light it, smoke it, and clean it as per normal (leave the tobacco chamber alone once I've cleared the ash and dottle). Once I see the start of cake formation, I begin the dry-reaming process (albeit I prefer to use wadded up copy-bond, or paper-towel to pipe-cleaner) to keep it at a manageable thickness. This leaves me with a very hard, almost glassy looking cake that takes some serious elbow grease to ream.

 

[withnail]

I do the same as Schmitzbitz. Leave things alone until a little cake forms then start a gentle rub round with a bent pipe cleaner once the pipe has cooled after smoking.

 

[hobie1dog]

same here +2

 

[brewshooter]

The cake is a lie!!!
That being said, you should go with the white cake, with the sweet frost.

 

[cortezattic]

Ditto. I always screw-in a paper towel sheet and burnish the heck out of the bowl's interior.

It really slows down the cake development process, but the cake that does form is very hard.

OTOH, Kevin, a certified tobacco something-or-other, said to never do the paper towel thing. I dunno why.
Here's Russ Ouellette's opinion on pipe break-in.

 

[chopz]

here's my humble opinion:
first of all, running a looped pipe cleaner inside the bowl is not going to remove cake. you're not going to scrub it, just brush loose flakes of ash and whatnot off. to remove the cake you'd need to do some serious scrubbing. the cake is gonna be a hard, dense gum. if it's not you won't be missing much by losing it.
secondly, i would guess between 75 and 100 - maybe more - smokes are needed to even begin to accumulate the first .01 inch of cake. don't even need that thickness to make a pipe pleasant to smoke, in my opinion. at once or twice a week wouldn't that take 18 - 24 months to achieve?
and i'll take yellow cake with chocolate frosting over all others. except maybe carrot cake.

 

[dylan793]

I honestly prefer a spice cake with some sort of glaze instead of icing 8)
To answer seriously, I'm sort of in the same boat as Dongreyface as in I don't smoke all day long. I get maybe 2 smokes per day in. Cake build-up is a slow process for me. After a smoke, I basically leave the bowl alone. I run a pipe cleaner through the stem and shank, and then pick out whatever "hunks" or peices of spent baccy may be left clinging to the sides of the bowl. That's about all I do. I certainly wouldn't want to really wipe down the inside of the bowl after every smoke. I imagine that wouldn't promote cake build-up at all.

 

[olderthandirt]

What... oh, that kind of cake?
White cake with those little cherry bits and chocolate frosting thank you.

 

[Strike Anywhere]

Cake formation is about like watching paint dry or the grass grow. If you sit there and stare at it, it's going to seem like nothing is going on. If you just go about your business, you'll need a reamer in no time. That being said, I am a firm believer that some folks make too much of cake formation. This is only my opinion, and I'm far from an expert, but I prefer a minimal cake. I think too much mutes the flavor of the tobacco. I want just a little bit (even less than what most people say is "ideal"). If I notice cake, that means there is too much! I always run a pipe cleaner through the stem and swab out the bowl after a smoke. Even if you like a good amount of cake, you want it to be slowly-forming, hard cake, not the soft, quickly forming cake you get from shaking ashes and not cleaning the bowl. With one of my first pipes, I always did the ash shaking thing after every smoke and all those other rituals. When I finally had to ream it the first time, all that cake just crumbled away to bare briar.

 

[dongreyface]

The cake is a lie!!!

The cake is very real my friend....it is very real.

Personally I want yellow cake uranium, I'm just gonna use it for power needs, yeah that's it, power. Pardon me, anybody have some missile parts I can buy? I'm not pointing anything at the anti's...you can take my word for it.

PM me.
Thanks everyone, I figured I wasn't doing any 'harm', but better to ask than not.

 

[thesmokindragon]

I do the pipe-cleaner clean for about the first dozen bowls or so,

then let things alone, seems to work wonders, if you can't wait, I

found a good pipe mud coating (cigar ash and water mixture/paste

helps it build much faster, no jellies or honey mix for this piper ;-)