About Pipes

Pipe Making

The first step of making a pipe is of course the selecting of the materials.  Lots of materials can be used in pipe manufacturing.  Among them, briar, which comes from the burl of the White Heath tree, is the most popular one recently.  It is suited for pipe making due to its nature of porous and hard burning.  When the mills selected burl as the material, they will cut it into small blocks, which are called ebauchons.  To remove the natural sap and resin from the ebauchons, it will need to be boiled in water.  After boiling it will be dried for several years.  This process is very important to give the pipe the best smoking quality. 

When those processes are all done, the ebauchons will be sold to the pipe makers.  The makers will then shape the pipe.  After all those steps, the shaped pipe will be fitted with a mouthpiece, sanded, stained, polished, and waxed.  Then the pipe is made. 

Pipe Maintaining

In order to keep and use your pipe longer, it is important to know how to take care of your pipe. 

The most basic and important thing you should do to maintain your pipe is cleaning.  The reason for doing this is that the pipe may have a sour taste if it is not cleaned regularly.  What you should do with the cleaning is to use a pipe cleaner and run it gently through the stem after knocking out all of the ash.  You may need to repeat this again and again using more than one pipe cleaner until the pipe cleaner comes out almost completely clean.  After that, a pipe cleaner will be used to clean the inside of the bowl by bend it in half, making one complete revolution. Otherwise, the carbonized tobacco might stick to the inside of the bowl, and too much cake might be built up.  The cake should be kept in a smaller size than 1/16 of an inch thick.  When it became too thick, you can use a pipe reaming tool to scrape the cake down to keep it in the expected size.  Sometimes, you might need some type of cleaning solvents when cleaning the stem and shank of your pipe, in order to keep your pipe fresh and prevent it from absorbing the moisture.  You can also use alcohol that more than 90 proof instead.

Another thing you need to remember is that before separating the mouthpiece from the bowl, you should leave it for a couple of hours after smoking to allow it to cool down.  Otherwise, you may break your pipe.