Would You Smoke Out Of This?? **Pics**

[redbeard]

All I have is estate pipes and have been trying my best to get them clean to smoke but noticed that some are just really badly messed up. This is one of them... The bowl has tons of scratches in it.... here are a few pics

I have a few more that seem to have white crap in them.... I dipped a pipe cleaner in alcohol and cleaned it up, it disappeared but is slowly coming back. I will post pics once it is how it was before.

 

[redbeard]

This is the second one that looks kind of funny to me... see the white looking build up at the bottom. Cant tell if it is just the wood or what, thank you for any input.

 

[cajundad]

+1 rothnh . First pipe needs to be reamed a bit . I dont think there is any burnout , but pits in the cake . Second pipe appears to have scratches in the wood . I would ream the first bowl , then do salt/everclear treatment on both . I would also retort the pipes as well .

 

[hfearly]

Redbeard: those bowls look "fine" as it goes for Estate pipes. Boy! Have I seen worse. Much, Much worse! The usual treatment, as suggested by rothnh, including reaming the interior, sanding it nice with 300grit, then a salt-alcohol treatment over night and these bowls should on the inside be good as new.
The white in the second picture which looks more like grayish to me just looks like your usual aromatic tobacco gunk. I don't think it's mold.

 

[lestrout]

red - those bowls may not be pristine but they aren't half bad. The fractured cake on the first bowl looks like an incomplete reaming, which is not a big problem. I would give them a trial puff with a light Virginia or neutral burley and see if any off flavors pop up before I took drastic action. Even with worse cases, I just hammer them with a strong Latakia to tame them.
hp

les

 

[redbeard]

Thank you everyone, there was one more pipe I had that had the white looking stuff on the bottom of the bowl after I did the alcohol/salt treatment. I took some alcohol on my finger and rubbed it around and dropped a tad into the hole at the bottom and it has not returned since....

 

[wildcat]

Redbeard: those bowls look "fine" as it goes for Estate pipes. Boy! Have I seen worse. Much, Much worse!

+1

 

[ejames]

Kinda looks to me as if the first pipe has some burnout. It doesn't appear to have any cake at the rim and the sides of the bowl are straight. You need to determine if those cracks are in cake or are burnt wood. If it is burnout,you can give the bowl walls a light coat of pipe mud and then smoke it as if you were breaking in a new pipe.Slowly build up some cake. Or you can just do that with out the pipe mud. The second pipe looks to me like it needs a good cleaning.