School me on Vulcanite

[Briar Lee]

I’ve been accumulating pipes for nearly fifty years, and the highest grade of black hard rubber pipe stem is vulcanite turned out of a rod.

One of the reasons I love Pipes by Lee is that if it’s a Lee it has a good stem made of the best vulcanite.

Cheaper pipes have moulded stems, some so cheap you can see mould markings.

I’d like to learn more about vulcanite stems, how they are made, and tips for determining quality.

Any schooling you could give me, will be much appreciated.

 

[OzPiper]

Different grades - unfortunately no way of knowing what you have just by looking.

Some makers do state that they use high quality German rod vulcanite for their stems. ?

Poor quality vulcanite oxidises readily and may look nice and black after a buff and polish, but will re-oxidise if you so much as look at them.

I have a Stanwell that I sent for re-stemming because it tasted sour and sulphury no matter what I did to clean it.

Recently I had to deoxidise a Pete stem (bought new) that is stored in a cupboard at all times, and had been smoked no more that 2-3 times. Very annoyed. ?

 

[sablebrush52]

Vulcanite, more properly called ebonite, is vulcanized rubber. Rubber is heated and infused with sulfur for long periods of time, which hardens the rubber, making it dimensionally stable and capable of retaining its shape. Ebonite was invented in 1839 by Charles Goodyear and was intended as a potential substitute for ebony and a number of other uses. In the early 1850's it was used in dentistry to make false teeth, it was polished for use in jewelry, and in 1856 was first advertised for the making of stems for tobacco pipes.

The sulfur content can vary in ebonite based on its intended use. Cheaper grades of rod stock contain higher percentages of sulfur and are harder. The highest grade was German rod stock, which has a lower sulfur content, giving it a little more "give" than lower grades.

Manufacturers like Barling, Dunhill, and Comoy used the highest grade German made rod stock. Charatan bought American product, which was of lower quality and less costly. Based on my experience of Sasieni stems, they also used a lower grade. BTW, rod stock is a little misleading. The raw material came in sheets, which were then sawn into rods for making stems. That's one of the details I learned from Ken Barnes, as well as Charatan's sourcing.

Lower quality ebonite may contain little flecks of what appear to be metal, another tidbit I got from Ken. Exposure to direct sunlight will degrade ebonite, causing the sulfur in it to discolor the material, eventually turning it yellow, and lower grades may develop a sulfurous odor.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Vulcanite, more properly called ebonite, is vulcanized rubber. Rubber is heated and infused with sulfur for long periods of time, which hardens the rubber, making it dimensionally stable and capable of retaining its shape. Ebonite was invented in 1839 by Charles Goodyear and was intended as a potential substitute for ebony and a number of other uses. In the early 1850's it was used in dentistry to make false teeth, it was polished for use in jewelry, and in 1856 was first advertised for the making of stems for tobacco pipes.

The sulfur content can vary in ebonite based on its intended use. Cheaper grades of rod stock contain higher percentages of sulfur and are harder. The highest grade was German rod stock, which has a lower sulfur content, giving it a little more "give" than lower grades.

Manufacturers like Barling, Dunhill, and Comoy used the highest grade German made rod stock. Charatan bought American product, which was of lower quality and less costly. Based on my experience of Sasieni stems, they also used a lower grade. BTW, rod stock is a little misleading. The raw material came in sheets, which were then sawn into rods for making stems. That's one of the details I learned from Ken Barnes, as well as Charatan's sourcing.

Lower quality ebonite may contain little flecks of what appear to be metal, another tidbit I got from Ken. Exposure to direct sunlight will degrade ebonite, causing the sulfur in it to discolor the material, eventually turning it yellow, and lower grades may develop a sulfurous odor.

I was just asking on another thread about whether vulcanite stems could be casted. Because I know that it has to undergo the vulcanizing process. Maybe these casted rubber stems are another type of rubber? Or, are claims that rubber stems are casted just a mistake in interpreting the process?

I get it that most are turned one of like briar. But, for the first time on the forum, we have so many that are convinced that most production stem are casted.

 

[Briar Lee]

About three years ago I did a major thinning of my stash of pipes, and if it wasn’t a four hole stinger Kaywoodie, a Lee or other good make of pipe it likely got passed on to a new home.

Since then I’ve likely replaced them all and then some, but with better pipes.

And I’ve noticed something about stems.

Some unseen hand of Adam Smith puts a higher grade stem on higher grade pipes, but he’s not consistent.

My old Bari Wiking, a gorgeous and massive chunk of very high grade straight grained and half sand blasted briar with a highly styled and carved stem wants to have the stem oxidize if I leave it alone a couple of months.

Yet a huge Marxman super Jumbo I have that’s likely three quarters of a century old has a beautiful stem not equaled except for second generation 5 pointed star Lees and my new White Spot NOT FOR SALE Prince of Wales. When ebonite is high grade and well finished it can look fantastic.

Then I have pipes like my $35 Serbian import SON that have beautifully made stems that shine like a cheap suit on a 70’s anchorman. A stem can be too polished to look high grade.

I need more schooling on how vulcanite stems are made.

There has to be some black art to get a black stem that looks just right, I think.

 

[sablebrush52]

I was just asking on another thread about whether vulcanite stems could be casted. Because I know that it has to undergo the vulcanizing process. Maybe these casted rubber stems are another type of rubber? Or, are claims that rubber stems are casted just a mistake in interpreting the process?

I get it that most are turned one of like briar. But, for the first time on the forum, we have so many that are convinced that most production stem are casted.

Injection molded stems are common, and I would guess are pretty much what all of the lower priced pipes use. There's no margin to pay for the handwork of making a stem from rod stock.

 

[paulfg]

Injection molded stems are common, and I would guess are pretty much what all of the lower priced pipes use. There's no margin to pay for the handwork of making a stem from rod stock.

yep look at a lot of universal replacement stems being sold and you can see the casting lines running down the sides that require cleaning up

 

[sasquatch]

Most stems on most pipes are "cast" I suppose, injection molded vulcanite. They come in every shape and size you can imagine (in fact in this picture you can see the designation number on some of the tenons.

This is what probably 99% of the pipes ever made got. That includes every Wilmer, Kaywoodie, Grabow (who now use ABS instead of vulcanite I'm told), every basket pipe in every shop that you've ever seen.


These get sanded heavily and polished up and look... just like a pipe stem.

In fact, @Briar Lee you had shown us a picture of some Lee pipes, stem on, and one of them, a higher grade one, had a lot more handwork done to it - you can tell it's the same basic stem but a lot more time went in.

This tradition comes from the French factories, some of which cast their own blanks, simply called "vulcanites" in the trade. Some higher end pipes got fully handmade (obviously with machines, but a stem made from a rod, not cast as a blank) stems. Dunhill stems are all cut, and the vulcanite is almost always better in those rods than the blanks in terms of not going grey/green with use. There are exceptions - old Master Craft pipes have stems that are obviously vulcanite, but it's a very impervious sort, and I don't know the chemical composition enough to say why. Savinelli offers the opposite - their vulcanite is super soft, goes grey in one smoke for me... it's terrible. I am told sulfur content is key, but I really don't know. I let the ebonite guys make ebonite, and I buy it.

Cutting a stem takes all kinds of time and skill, and so you just never, ever see a cut vulcanite (rod form called "ebonite") stem on an inexpensive pipe. If you buy an 80 dollar Peterson with a vulcanite stem, it's not as good a material as the rod-stock cut stem on a 300 dollar one.

Being cut from rod doesn't guarantee a stem is good - being cut from rod by someone who knows what they are about does though, and I've never known cast stem as smooth inside as the best cut stems, and that's where the rubber hits the road, as it were. Those old Barlings and Sasienis are like glass inside the stem. No rough transitions.

There are good cast stems, both in terms of function and durability, and there are bad ones. I don't know how to tell them apart except to use a pipe and see what happens. I hate vulcanite, almost all the pipes I use are acrylic.

 

[georged]

Interesting sidenote:

The worst vulcanite/ebonite I've ever seen has been on some ultra-high-grade Danish and Japanese pipes. So many inclusions their stems looked like night-sky constellations.

How did that happen? Those sculptured-shape guys like soft rubber because it's easier to work with, and the softer varieties of it are less forgiving to manufacture than the harder ones... and eventually a bad batch "got loose." Some of it is undoubtedly sitting on pipemakers' shelves to this day.

On the other hand, a line of currently produced molded blanks are spot-on top quality. Indistinguishable from NYH rod stock (i.e. best stuff, imo). Useless for anything except traditional, frazed, small(ish) Brit shapes and stick-stem freehands, of course, which is why solo carvers today rarely use them.

And for those of you who might be thinking "That settles it, then... acrylic IS better!", not so fast. Plastic stem material also varies in quality. The spectrum runs from brittle, crumbly, garbagecrapjunkshit to something the Space Shuttle hull could have been made from.

As for the whole comfort thing, a stem's SHAPE matters far more than either material or (within reason) thickness. The end.

Regarding oxidation/greening, yup, plastic won't ever, while (to varying degrees) sun-exposed rubber always will. No getting around that.

Which material is "better"? I could tell you, but Kevin would shoot me. More threads have been posted going back and forth about THAT than any other topic in the history of the Internet. lol

 

[sasquatch]

Man you're dumb George, that's the ultra-rare "My God, it's full of stars!" ebonite they used shooting 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

View attachment 105786

Most stems on most pipes are "cast" I suppose, injection molded vulcanite. They come in every shape and size you can imagine (in fact in this picture you can see the designation number on some of the tenons.

This is what probably 99% of the pipes ever made got. That includes every Wilmer, Kaywoodie, Grabow (who now use ABS instead of vulcanite I'm told), every basket pipe in every shop that you've ever seen.


These get sanded heavily and polished up and look... just like a pipe stem.

In fact, @Briar Lee you had shown us a picture of some Lee pipes, stem on, and one of them, a higher grade one, had a lot more handwork done to it - you can tell it's the same basic stem but a lot more time went in.

This tradition comes from the French factories, some of which cast their own blanks, simply called "vulcanites" in the trade. Some higher end pipes got fully handmade (obviously with machines, but a stem made from a rod, not cast as a blank) stems. Dunhill stems are all cut, and the vulcanite is almost always better in those rods than the blanks in terms of not going grey/green with use. There are exceptions - old Master Craft pipes have stems that are obviously vulcanite, but it's a very impervious sort, and I don't know the chemical composition enough to say why. Savinelli offers the opposite - their vulcanite is super soft, goes grey in one smoke for me... it's terrible. I am told sulfur content is key, but I really don't know. I let the ebonite guys make ebonite, and I buy it.

Cutting a stem takes all kinds of time and skill, and so you just never, ever see a cut vulcanite (rod form called "ebonite") stem on an inexpensive pipe. If you buy an 80 dollar Peterson with a vulcanite stem, it's not as good a material as the rod-stock cut stem on a 300 dollar one.

Being cut from rod doesn't guarantee a stem is good - being cut from rod by someone who knows what they are about does though, and I've never known cast stem as smooth inside as the best cut stems, and that's where the rubber hits the road, as it were. Those old Barlings and Sasienis are like glass inside the stem. No rough transitions.

There are good cast stems, both in terms of function and durability, and there are bad ones. I don't know how to tell them apart except to use a pipe and see what happens. I hate vulcanite, almost all the pipes I use are acrylic.

So, those premade stems in that picture, are they truly vulcanite or some sort of plastic?
I hope I’m not asking questions that are too dumb.

 

[sasquatch]

Those are vulcanite. It's ground up into basically dust, heated and forced into shaped moulds is my understanding. Occassionally you find a blank like that with a crack or a fissure because of it, which never really happens with the rod stock.

There are other stem materials in play these days, including ABS plastic, polyester, acrylics, Juma... lots of fun stuff. But the run of the mill stem blank is vulcanized rubber you bet.

 

[mingc]

Man you're dumb George, that's the ultra-rare "My God, it's full of stars!" ebonite they used shooting 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I was going to say it sure looks pretty!

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Those are vulcanite. It's ground up into basically dust, heated and forced into shaped moulds is my understanding. Occassionally you find a blank like that with a crack or a fissure because of it, which never really happens with the rod stock.

There are other stem materials in play these days, including ABS plastic, polyester, acrylics, Juma... lots of fun stuff. But the run of the mill stem blank is vulcanized rubber you bet.

Thank you

 

[PipeIT]

What’s the deal with Cumberland, what is it all about? I’ve been surfing the web reading what I can find, but the info I’ve been reading isn’t consistent, from one description to another.

 

[sasquatch]

Cumberland is a rod made (traditionally) from a mix of red and black ebonite. It can be wrapped in sheets or done as a group of long rods crushed together, which is a much nicer presentation. There are now many colors available, SEM in Germany has pushed the envelope on food-grade colorants for the ebonite.



You can see the red streaking pretty well here in the stem.

 

[sasquatch]

And really the name "Cumberland" comes from Dunhill, they used this type of rod on a series they named "Cumberland" many years ago.

 

[romaso]

Regarding oxidation/greening, yup, plastic won't ever, while (to varying degrees) sun-exposed rubber always will. No getting around that.

Any suggestions for removing the oxidation/greening?

 

[romaso]

Exposure to direct sunlight will degrade ebonite, causing the sulfur in it to discolor the material, eventually turning it yellow, and lower grades may develop a sulfurous odor.

Any suggestions for removing the sulfur & discoloration?

 

[georged]

Any suggestions for removing the oxidation/greening?

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFwwtvtKlXW8nWQ-E9oO-YwMqCWuvBHDE