Pipe problems!

[berighton]

My girlfriend got me these awesome pipe. I haven't smoked out of it yet, I thought I'd wait and get some advice.

The bowl has a bottom piece that isn't completely air tight. In some of the pictures you can see light coming through. Should I try to seal this with some kind of wood seal or will it be fine if I just let it be?

My second problem is cleaning the stem. A pipecleaner doesn't fit all the way in. There's a section of the stem that's to small for it to push all the way through after it only goes in a bit. How should I go about cleaning the stem?

Any other advice on what to do with a fixed stem pipe would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you all!

 

[cobguy]

Welcome to the forum berighton.
I can't see the picture so I'll offer some general advice:
If you want to fill that spot, a thick slurry of super glue and fine wood shavings works well.

Work it into the hole with a needle or pin and you can sand / restain later if you want to.
Try a smaller and/or tapered pipe cleaner for your stem.
Good luck!

 

[sablebrush52]

I can't see the picture that you posted, but from what you write, this sounds like a pipe with an air carburetor in the base, and a metal filter in the stem. Is this pipe a Kaywoodie?

In any event, do not seal up the carburetor! It's supposed to be open, allowing some additional airflow to help cool the smoke and improve burning of the tobacco. The filter in the stem is there to also act as a condenser to cool the smoke and keep glop from getting into the stem. A pipe cleaner will not pass through it without unscrewing the stem from the shank and feeding a small gauge pipe cleaner through the opening in the filter, which is also called a stinger. This is normal. The pipe cleaner test is not an infallible metric for determining the quality of a pipe's engineering.

 

[tuold]

I think you would come into significant trouble if you tried to smoke that pipe. You can see daylight through the bottom of the "bowl"! I wonder if it was even intended to be smoked in the first place. Maybe just put it on the shelf as the first of your collection

 

[sablebrush52]

I think you would come into significant trouble if you tried to smoke that pipe. You can see daylight through the bottom of the "bowl"! I wonder if it was even intended to be smoked in the first place. Maybe just put it on the shelf as the first of your collection

There are pipes made with carburetors in the base of the bowl to mix the air flow and improve burning. Kaywoodie's carburetor pipes were the largest selling pipes in the world, alone outselling all of Dunhill's production in the late 1930's. There will be NO problem using that pipe if this is a carburetor, which is a metal fitment in the bottom of the bowl with an airway in it.

 

[tuold]

Here's what it looks like:

 

[sablebrush52]

Cigar and water mixture to block the hole, but I would not smoke this pipe. It is a goner.

Which pipe? The original poster's pipe that his girlfriend bought for him, or the metal pipe that tuold just posted?

 

[allan]

Thanks, Sable
I didn't know about the carburetor thing. I knew that Kaywoodie made some excellent pipes back in the first half of the 20th century, using very old briar, but I did not know that they mass produced so many.