Sounds bad right? And this might upset Kaywoodie collectors, but I felt the need to DO SOMETHING! I don't care for painted pipes much at all, but the Coral White Kaywoodies seemed a little more interesting, and when I saw this one for under $10 I knew I wanted to mess it up a little. It wasn't in very good shape, and had a 3 hole stinger. I hate stingers, sorry but that's just the way I am, so I knew that this would be the perfect victim to have the stinger cut off. All I had to do was make the pipe something I would like to smoke and I would finally have a regular Kaywoodie that would pass a pipe cleaner, have an open draw, and I could enjoy smoking.
As you can see the pipe had the usual chips and damage to the white finish. Fairly nasty all in all. I got some biodegradable stripper and after four separate coats and scraping and wire brushing I got most of the white off. It's pretty tough stuff! Funny, the nomenclature was only stamped weakly into the white finish. There was no evidence whatsoever of it on the briar underneath after I did the first wipe off of the paint. Well at least it still has the clover stem logo. It took lots of soaking in alcohol and wire brushing to get it to the point where I needed to use a small Dremel diamond sanding point to remove the really stubborn little bits of white left in the wood. After another alcohol soak, and wire brushing it looked ready for some sanding, and staining. I went with Fiebing's Tan stain, and when I flamed it things got a little weird. The high parts on the briar darkened, while leaving the low spots lighter. This usually the opposite of what rusticated pipes look like. So I gave it another coat, flamed it again, and the high parts got even darker. Looked kind of interesting to me, so I did some light buffing with tripoli, and white diamond, and finally some wax.
I'm still a little on the fence about its looks, but it is certainly different! I think I'll leave it as is and give it a few smokes and think about it. But to be honest, I don't know what else I could do other than stain the whole thing dark brown.
As you can see the pipe had the usual chips and damage to the white finish. Fairly nasty all in all. I got some biodegradable stripper and after four separate coats and scraping and wire brushing I got most of the white off. It's pretty tough stuff! Funny, the nomenclature was only stamped weakly into the white finish. There was no evidence whatsoever of it on the briar underneath after I did the first wipe off of the paint. Well at least it still has the clover stem logo. It took lots of soaking in alcohol and wire brushing to get it to the point where I needed to use a small Dremel diamond sanding point to remove the really stubborn little bits of white left in the wood. After another alcohol soak, and wire brushing it looked ready for some sanding, and staining. I went with Fiebing's Tan stain, and when I flamed it things got a little weird. The high parts on the briar darkened, while leaving the low spots lighter. This usually the opposite of what rusticated pipes look like. So I gave it another coat, flamed it again, and the high parts got even darker. Looked kind of interesting to me, so I did some light buffing with tripoli, and white diamond, and finally some wax.
I'm still a little on the fence about its looks, but it is certainly different! I think I'll leave it as is and give it a few smokes and think about it. But to be honest, I don't know what else I could do other than stain the whole thing dark brown.
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