A Better Pipe Smoking Community

After a lot of hesitation I decided to try my hand at staining a virgin pipe.
The pipe is a Savinelli Grezze also know as Savinelli Natural. The bowl is totally untreated, it is not even sanded to a very high grit. This one have a balsa 9mm filter, it smokes very dry but the balsa adds some taste to the smoke.

I'm very happy with the final result, but to be true I must tell that it isn't what I was aiming for.

The virgin pipe. The only marks are ITALY and the Savinelli shield.

It took me much longer than usual to bring this 2 babes up to speed.
Both had lots of aromatic cake and even after a good cleanup and 3 A&S treatment I can taste some floral perfume, I have no idea what is the tobacco that left such perfume beyond. One thing I'm sure, both had the same owner...
They were bought in a local flea market, each was 10€. The pipe stand was an offer.

The billiard is a Chacom Virgin shape 182 the bowl is not very big but it have thin walls so it's quite capacious.

This afternoon I finished the cleanup process for 2 of the 4 estate I bought last Sunday.

The 1st one is a black, rusticated billiard with a long and very thin tapered stem.
It's and italian job, the label says "Capitol Bruyere" and "127 ITALY". I never heard about Capitol but the pipe looks to be very good, the rustication is not very deep but it is a professional job, very regular. It had a thick cake that I sanded almost to the bare wood. I really have to get a good reamer, sandpaper doesn't work well for the bottom cake.

I should say home mixing instead of blending, most of us don't have the means and knowledge to do real blending.
Because I'm mixing small quantities I and all the tobaccos have a similar cuts I used a small glass (looks like a tequila shot glass) and did the mixing by volume. I have a digital kitchen scale but it only measure grams, not 1/10's so, the error would be too big for this quantities.

- Capt. Bob's "Pot O' Gold" -
3 x Two Friends Heritage
2 x C&D Riverboat Gambler
1 x C&D Autumn Evening

- My Own "Chinese Morning 51" -

This is why, every now and then, I go to the flea market that happens every last sunday of the month in a place near my house.
It's a small market, you can go over all the stands in about half an hour, most of it is of no interest to me of course, but there's always one or two stands that have a few pipes.
I have no idea where those pipes come from, as far as I know there's never been a pipe factory in Portugal but most of them looks like they have survived a major firestorm followed by years and years of exposure to the elements.

Most of us have relatives or friends that give us pipe related stuff.
This is what I got this year.

This pipe I got for myself, a Chacom Cordoba shape 17, the grain is a bit weak but I think it is beautiful like this. I have another Cordoba (shape 861) and it's one of my best smokers.

This is probably the cheapest possible buffing station

The hand drill was less than 11,00 €, the clamp about 8,00€ and I have 4 wheels (less than 5,00 € each).
I wouldn't dare to try to drill a hole in the wall with that, but look at the trigger, that small black disk let me lock the trigger at any speed over 50 RPM, the manual says that top speed is about 550 RPM, not much but it should be enough for everything I need.

At last I got a Savinelli, in this case 2.

ebay photos:

I don't know if they'll be good smokers, but I've been looking for a Canadian billiard (oval shrank) for some time. I think I'm really old fashioned, as the time passes, more and more I like the classical shapes.

However I lost a wonderful GBD full of birdseys just because I went to bed early and the bid I left wasn't enough... :-(

Just finished assembly the new home for my growing pipe "accumulation".
This is a cheap IKEA module that my wife transformed in a very nice set of drawers with her paint brushes, wax and a lot of elbow grease.
This wood is awful, we were not able to get a good shine from it even using the same wax I use on the pipes, I guess that's the difference between hard woods and the agglomerate used by IKEA.
I'd like to make the front of the drawers really shinny. Do you have any suggestion ?

I had decided to stop browsing ebay and buying pipes from other sources until I had the complete Latitude 41 (from Jan Zeman) series, which is 7 pipes, that should have kept me quiet happy until the middle of the next year.

So, this PAD attack was unexpected and unwelcome.

However the pipe is beautiful, it's a CHACOM Cordoba shape 861, which is a slightly bent (maybe 1/8) billiard, exactly the shape and color (natural) that at the moment I enjoy most. This is my first french pipe and, based on the first smoke (1 rubbed out Univ. Flake), it might be a good pipe after all.