Leave Cake Or Take It Down To Wood?

[vabriar]

I'm sure this has been covered somewhere here on the forums but I can not locate it. When restoring/sanitizing an estate pipe should I be reaming the bowl back down to bare wood or leave some cake? In the past I have reamed and left a thin layer of cake on some pipes and on others I have used sandpaper and sanded back down to bare wood. In both cases I then take pipe cleaners dipped in 100 proof vodka, swab out the bowl and let air dry. I have had good smoking experiences with both of my methods but have started to wonder if leaving cake on an estate pipe is sanitary. I know the salt treatment helps with ghosting but I'm more interested in the sanitizing aspect.
Any thoughts or links to threads where this topic has been covered are appreciated.

 

[mso489]

I'm not a fan of cake and keep it almost nonexistent in my pipes, but part of the benefit of estate pipes is that they are broken in,

so if you ream a bowl back to bare wood, you've lost some of the value. I'd sand it or ream it back very thin and wipe the pipe out

each time you smoke it to keep it extra thin. If you are not an experienced pipe restorer or repairman, go very gentle with a reamer.

Reamers have likely ruined more pipes than they've improved, grinding into the briar and leaving it irregular and subject to burnout.

I don't even own a reamer, and some of my pipes are nearly, or over, forty years old. A carbon coating is all you need. Skip the cake.

 

[sablebrush52]

I've both removed the old cake down to bare wood and left a thin veil. My reason for complete removal was to get rid of stubborn mustiness or stale sweetness that didn't respond to other treatment. But normally I think that it's both unnecessary and a bad idea to clean all the way to bare wood if you primarily buy used pipes (otherwise genteelly referred to as "estates"...).
Why, ask you? Because you don't know what horrors lurk beneath that protective coating, horrors that have been long. perhaps decades, in the making, but which are kept in check by the thin coating of cake. Once you have removed that cake, all bets are off. Spider webbing and other such realities are loosed upon your world. And you have to slowly rebuild that cake to once more subdue them.
S/A treatment, or hot alcohol retort flushes are usually enough to knock out any malodorous ghosts left by previous users poor choices in tobacco. A bit of cake protects you from the consequences their crappy smoking habits.

 

[pitchfork]

I prefer to get down to bare wood. Things just seem fresher and cleaner that way. But sable is right -- you might not be doing your pipe a favor by doing that.
Basically, if it's a really old pipe with thin walls, I leave some cake. In a couple of cases, I've made my own bowl coating to protect an old, thin-walled pipe where I should have just left the cake intact.

 

[billypm]

No one seems to have dealt with the sanitary aspect of this discussion yet. My take is that once you give the shank and bowl a good alcohol wipe you are ok. I doubt that there are meanies hiding in the old cake that are just lurking there, waiting to get out. But you know my motto: "Seldom right- never in doubt".

 

[vabriar]

Thanks for all the input guys! I've only taken one back to wood so far and all the other I left a very thin cake. Was just curious how others handled the sanitizing.

 

[natenice1]

+1 Tom (mso 489)

 

[jeepnewbie]

A good treatment should be enough to deal with the sanitary part. Briar wood is porous enough to breath so microorganisms could possibly even get into the wood. I would leave a bit of cake (thats what I always do) to keep the protective layer like everyone else suggested. The alcohol should be enough to kill any that may lurk in there.
I would then scrub the draught and bore till you don't get anything on a pipe cleaner. Some pipes I've restored where so nasty in those areas, and took about 20 or 30 pipe cleaners to get them clean again. Thats without doing the heated alcohol treatment, as I don't have the stuff to do that yet.
This is coming from a guy who won't touch the door of a public rest room when leaving it.

 

[lucky695]

back to (almost) bare... 151 wash rinse repeat... (germ-a-phobe here!)

 

[antbauers]

+1 mso489
Sablebrush and ape1pt have very good points also. I have founds lot of spiderwebbing and pipes starting to burn out. But I still ream to bare wood because I like to know what I'm dealing with and I fix it. Getting rid of the cake, to me is part of cleaning an estate. Like others have said it rids of anything unwanted or nasty, then its off to a thorough alcohol treatment. It might need to be smoked a few times to build a little cake but its all part of restoring estates.

 

[toby67]

I received my first two pipes with so much cake that it almost halved the bowl size. I reamed them back leaving about a millimetre of cake to keep the pipe in a broken in state, I then wiped them down gently with "clean & cure" to ride them of that sour taste and dipped a pipe cleaner in the clean & cure (alcohol) and gave the stems a very good clean, end result after leaving them to sit for a day was a very pleasant smoke giving the fullness of flavour the tobacco has to offer. Since then I have acquired a further 4 estate pipes and did the same and they are all now in my rotation. I also purchased a couple of cheap pipes ($25-35) that had filters but I remove the filters and the pipes are pleasant to smoke.
Now to my question, two of my three broken pipes just need new mouthpieces / stems, one I stuffed up and broke (Duhh) .. anyone know where I might buy them from, they are different sizes and I would like to have these pipes restored and in my rotation. Please PM me if you know of a site I might purchase them from.