A few years ago I used to make Sterling Silver jewellery, well long story short, when I separated from my wife I lost most of my tools but fortunately not my Dremel with a 3ft Flexishaft and a few other little things that I also used with the Jewelery.
Anyway onto subject, I have been wanting to clean up the outer parts of a few pipes and today I was reaming the last few of my recently acquired "uncleaned" estate pipes. About 3-4 of these pipes were purchased from a bloke on eBay that uses this nugget like brownish stem gunk that dries uneven and tastes like dog crap mixed with vinegar to form a paste. He did this to cover oxidation from the stems rather than clean them up and buff them.
I am yet to get bowl and stem polish and with these cheap pipes I thought I would try the polish chalk I used to use for silver, it's called "Dialux". I used felt buffing pads on the Dremel. It cleaned up all oxidation from the stems and made them like new. So anyway I thought I would try it on the bowls but with much less Dialux, WOW, it buffed them up really nice and took away the years of "tarnish" and gave the bowls a like new sheen. The knocks and scratches still show but the pipes look cool.
I even polished the unsmoked 1981 Christmas Comoy and it looks brilliant.
Guess I'm on the way to fixing up estate pipes, I got myself hooked. However I will still get the proper stem and bowl polish and only use Dialux to get rid of old tarnish.
Sorry for rambling.
Anyway onto subject, I have been wanting to clean up the outer parts of a few pipes and today I was reaming the last few of my recently acquired "uncleaned" estate pipes. About 3-4 of these pipes were purchased from a bloke on eBay that uses this nugget like brownish stem gunk that dries uneven and tastes like dog crap mixed with vinegar to form a paste. He did this to cover oxidation from the stems rather than clean them up and buff them.
I am yet to get bowl and stem polish and with these cheap pipes I thought I would try the polish chalk I used to use for silver, it's called "Dialux". I used felt buffing pads on the Dremel. It cleaned up all oxidation from the stems and made them like new. So anyway I thought I would try it on the bowls but with much less Dialux, WOW, it buffed them up really nice and took away the years of "tarnish" and gave the bowls a like new sheen. The knocks and scratches still show but the pipes look cool.
I even polished the unsmoked 1981 Christmas Comoy and it looks brilliant.
Guess I'm on the way to fixing up estate pipes, I got myself hooked. However I will still get the proper stem and bowl polish and only use Dialux to get rid of old tarnish.
Sorry for rambling.