This one is officially my first restoration.


This pipe was my "noob pipe" from Ebay. I bought it without really looking closely enough at the photos. The pipe was a bit...rough, shall we say. Full of nastiness in the bowl, shank and stem, hole in the stem, collapsed bit from being chewed so hard. As I don't have a reamer, I reamed it with my finger and 80 grit sandpaper, then gave it several salt treatments in both bowl and shank.


I decided to lose the rustication because, even after several cleaning attempts, there was still some nasty dirt in the grain. I sanded it for a long time, all the way up to 2500 grit, then I gave it several coats of Tung oil, with a final polish with micromesh up to 12k, then a soft cloth buff.


The bit was sort of a pain, but I managed to reconstruct it with JB Weld. It doesn't look great, but when I put shrink wrap on it, you won't see the grey. I gave the stem a bleach 50/50 treatment, then sanded it from 220 all the way up to 12k micromesh, then hit it with some of the Walker polish.


I know I lost a bit of material off the bowl, so the walls are likely a bit thin, but I suppose I won't know how that impacts things until I smoke it, which should be soon!


Here are the before shots: