Mortise Muck

[badbeard]

Do you go back to bed and roll around after taking a shower? Is that how much you like a well seasoned mortise?

Mortise season is kinda like this - You eat a hearty breakfast, and then an hour or so later you burp and you get a little bacon flashback. I live for that moment. Nothing like purposeful ghost layering.. Brown flake scented, then SWRA right on top of all that funkiness. It's a beautiful thing.
Seriously though, I have found the more meticulously I clean my pipes the worse they perform. I do the minimal amount possible to keep them in service, so as not to disturb the balance in the pipe ecosystem. You start messing with that too much and you'll start contributing to globowl warming.

 

[mingc]

I dunno.. I kinda like my mortise muck. Except I call it mortise "season".

Pipe smegma? ?

 

[OzPiper]

I was gobsmacked when I recently took apart a favourite pipe I'd bought new in the '70's for a refurb and clean. I'd used pipe cleaner(s) and wiped the bowl out after every smoke. The rim was scorched when I used a blowtorch sometime ago.

I reamed the bowl pretty much back to bare wood, topped the rim and sanded the inner diameter back to round, followed by an alcohol soak - all very straight forward.

The huge surprise was when I examined the mortise/shank with a strong light. It took several hours of serious reaming/digging and flushing to remove the concreted mortise muck. Mea culpa ! Never will I accuse others of neglecting their pipe hygiene again.

I now intend to water flush this pipe after each smoke and compare it with an unflushed pipe after a similar number of smokes.

 

[anantaandroscoggin]

Not personally being a Felix Unger among pipe smokers, I suspect that when the mortise gap gets pretty full, some of it is then passed up the pipe stem airway in order to deposit some of the muck inside my mouth, thus notifying me that this pipe is due for a major cleaning!

Also, I went online and ordered a 3-pack of that tool from eB (I lose things too often) for $9.99. I like it, though I'm curious why both ends have the same tool-edge angle, and not one of them being square across.

 

[Servant King]

Stem is still pretty tight, even after the Everclear treatment to the shank. Hmmm...

Update: per the sound advice of Mike @ BriarBlues, I tried rubbing the tenon with a nub of dried-out hand soap. Just a light coating, nothing major.

WOW. What a tremendous difference. I highly recommend this to anyone who has a tenon-mortise fit that's just a wee bit too tight for comfort. ???