This may have been covered before. I am getting more into pipes and expect that I will pick up some estate pipes. How is the best way to clean them before use? I would think washing the stim to start. What else is usually needed though?
Fuzzy! Step one: Plug stem and shank with cleaner, then fill bowl with salt. Pour a little vodka onto the salt. Don't overfill. Let this dry for two days. This will cleanse old tar. Salt will draw it out. Tap out and swab with bristle cleaner. Step two: trim and even out cake in bowl if needed. Step three: polish stems shiny using baking soda and water paste. Then polish with tiny amount of olive oil or other light vegetable oil. The brown is oxidation. It's beautiful underneath! Buff until happy. Step four: Saturate a rag in Pledge furniture polish. Let rag dry until scent is almost gone. Use this waxy cloth for general polishing. Step four: Smoke some stuff.
Use cheap vodka and soft pipe cleaners for daily stem swab. Bristle cleaner and vodka once every couple of weeks. Specialized pipe cleaning fluid costs 10x as much as a pint of cheap hundred proof.
On heavily oxidized vulcanite stems I use a metal polish, Simichrome, really breaks through. I also found this: https://pipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_care/cleaning
I do all of this and take the additional step of using a pipe retort system; it totally wipes out the ghost of other smokes.
I bought mine here, donations are made to Wounded Warrior Project. http://m.ebay.com/itm/PIPE-RETORT-f...%3A231cecbc15d0aa166e5f0e4cffeedd30%7Ciid%3A1
I used the large crystal sea salt and alcohol method on an estate pipe or two. Stuffing in a fuzzy pipe cleaner through the draft hole keeps salt from getting stuck & large crystal doesn't hurt either. Upside - Everclear goes well with minty sweet tea.
Many years ago I worked in a tobacconist shop. We would clean our estate pipes with thick pipe cleaners dipped in high proof rum or whiskey. Worked just fine.
I'm resurrecting an old thread here. I've been using a cheap cob pipe. I just picked up a couple of nice old estate pipes in a whim super cheap. I plan to use the steps @BamaSamurai mentioned in cleaning them up. What should I use to clean and sanitize the stem inside and out before buffing? Sent from my Pixel 2 using Tapatalk
The pipe cleaner dipped in vodka does good inside the stem.i I figure the baking soda cleaning on the outsideof the stem will take care of that too.
