Special thanks to
@Briarcutter for convincing me not to do a full on restoration on this gorgeous pipe
What we have here is a Peterson system clay - previously i dated it to the 50s, following a rebornpipes article in which he wrote Mark about a similar pipe. After working on it and having personally seen some clays from the 50s, I am not that convinced... I will try to do a deep dive research on the subject, but I have a feeling that the pipe is quite a bit older than that... Major hint for now is the shape number stamp, but we will see.
The restoration process was extremely fun me and I had to take some interesting decisions but at at the end I am extremely happy with the results.
I buffed the nickel ferule a bit, since I don't like the hazy tarnished nickel look that much... Silver oxidation is a different story.
Deoxidized and polished the stem.
On the inside the chamber was cleaned and the cake was brought down to a very thin layer. It wasn't passing a pipe cleaner through the draught hole, so I decided to actually redrill it slightly to widen it and smooth out some uneven spots (nerve-wracking job on such an old clay pipe).
On the outside i cleaned the surface to a certain degree, without going too crazy and digging into everything hole and bump...There were quite a lot of damaged areas , which I decided not to try to fill up, but I wanted to make sure they wouldn't grow or cause more issues issues down the line, so softened them a bit with some very fine sandpaper and files. I did basically the same on the rim, where the more serious chips were located, but this time I went a couple of grits down with the starting sandpaper. A few seconds under a very soft and slow buffing wheel and Et Voilà
PS - it smokes surprisingly well and it doesn't get hotter than a smooth meer...
petersonpipenotes.org
