New Pipe Smoker With A Question? Ask an Old Fart

[Subvet642]

Originally Posted by WaRevo

For me I am different then most people that smoke pipe. In some cases I do the Dennis method and I use Prince Albert to start my break in. However seeing that I am not like most I rarely have a pipe with cake in it. I make sure that I clean my pipe after every use and that I keep the stem and bowl as clean as I can daily. I do use alot of Cleaners and from what I have seen in Estate pipes that I have bought I can't understand really how some people could let the pipe fill with such cake. I mean I have had some pipes that you couldn't even put a Pipe tool into let alone a Dr. Grabow filter How in the world did they even smoke the pipe. Then when I take the stem out and it is filled with SO MUCH junk I am like OMG that is nasty. This one pipe I just got from a person that said they didn't want to smoke pipe anymore and didn't like it, Buying the pipe at 1/4 the cost of new because he thought there was something wrong with it. I get it, The pipe wasn't really deep with cake but the drawhole was filled with unsmoked tobacco and the buildup in the shank was deep tar and i was like no wonder they didn't like it. Honestly it looked like they never ran a pipe cleaner in the stem or shank at all. Again the bowl wasn't that bad, ran a Czech took around the bowl maybe 15 times before it was a good clean thin cake. The shank took my shank brush, 40 Q-tips before it came out looking almost clean and the stem took 15 Q-tips and 5 bristle pipe cleaners, and 4 soft pipe cleaners before I could pass it with Alcohol on the tip and pull all the way through clean.

my first thought when I seen this was It had to have been HORRID to smoke this pipe.

James

Hi James, I'm kinda anal like that, too. I've only bought estate pipes that have been reasonably serviced; you know, bowl reamed, everything cleaned up a bit. I, of course, do my own cleaning, too.

Mark, thanks for the links! And thanks for the good advice from Brian and the Rev, too. I'm not too worried about smoking too fast, see, I smoke a lot of small ring CC's so I tend to smoke slowly, anyway. Hopefully, the Chacoms won't give me too much trouble. I hear that they're pretty cool smokers and the smallish bowl sizes suit me as well. Besides, they make such pretty pipes.