Turbocat’s Meerschaum Rehab Program

Since meerschaum coloring is being discussed, I thought I would take a moment to pontificate on the topic, which is the most myth plagued aspect of meerschaum pipes.

Meerschaum is technically sepiolite. A naturally occurring version of magnesium silicate. The name is used now commonly for manufactured and pressed versions as well. It occurs throughout the world, although in few places for pipe and carving grade. It used to be mined even here in the US, but not for pipes, etc., but rather for filtering material. It’s now manufactured in the range of millions of tons per year to be used as a filter material, since it is one of the best in existence and has widespread uses in industrial and chemical applications, as well as the food industry. It’s quite non toxic. Anyway, the reason I mention all of this is because that’s why it colors. The moisture from smoking is rapidly absorbed into it and it traps the color/particles in it, mostly at the wax layer.

First, this only applies to “block” meerschaum, that is naturally occurring sepiolite that is carved into a pipe. Many pipes available today, as well as most meerschaum bowls for calabash pipes are made from processed “pressed” or manufactured meerschaum. They don’t color in the sense being talked about here. But that’s a different and more complex point that I won’t go into right now.

The first big factor in coloring is the quality of the meerschaum used. Being naturally occurring, it is not evenly dense or fracture free, even though it appears that way. This is the primary reason that they color somewhat blotchy at times. Higher quality meerschaum tends to color more evenly. Here are two pipes I grabbed from my collection (not the best examples I have, but they were the easiest to get to)



Notice the evenness of the coloring on the shank of the billiard shape one.

Coloring bowls. They work because moisture doesn’t congregate in the mid or upper part of the bowl, but rather is drawn down and through as we smoke. A coloring bowl spreads the moisture/smoke/tobacco juice throughout the entire pipe as you smoke creating a more even distribution. Even this won’t guarantee a fully colored pipe, because of the consistency of meerschaum I mentioned earlier, but it works more often than not.

The next factor is the thickness of the walls of the pipe. Thinner areas, faster absorption and pass through, more color and vice versa.

The next factor is what kind of tobacco you smoke in it. Most produce a brown to orange color, but some aromatics, 1Q for example will occasionally show up as varying shades of red and pink.

The next factor is wax. The color shows up on the outside layer of the meerschaum when the evaporation of moisture stops, or at least slows considerably. It’s a bit more complicated than that but I’m already getting carried away with this post.

The artisans of the past understood all of this and the finer pipes were often designed to color in a particular way to achieve cool effects. Beards and hair coloring first on facial figural pipes, etc. they also painted areas to hide the coloring. This is an example, not my pipe, it would have taken hours to dig out one of mine like this.



If you look carefully at her chin/neck, you can see the line of white paint. Her face was painted white so as the coloring happened, her hair and clothes would color but her face would stay white. Obviously it hasn’t been smoked enough to show the full effect. This was also often done with some of the classic egg in claw/talon pipes, egg painted white so only the claw would show the coloring. Btw, yes, they used white lead to paint it back then.

There’s far more to the topic than I’ve covered here, but since it’s a natural material, the whole process of coloring is not always predictable, but that’s one of the things I like about these pipes and frankly I don’t care that much about the whole coloring aspect myself, except I am thinking about buying this pipe-

I've never seen anything quite like it. It's quite lovely. Not sure how practical it would have been, though. It's kind of amazing it's survived this long without any part of the meerschaum getting broken.

Time to add another calabash pipe to my rotation, so I picked a big one out of my collection. Made by Egro in Holland, I don’t know anything about them.



This pipe obviously hadn’t been used much in the past, but enough combined with age and poor storage issues that it needed more than just a good wipe down to put into use.

I started with the stem. It is rare to find calabash pipes other than Pioneer brand ones that have any version of hard rubber stems. This is one of the rare ones and the oxidation on the stem was thick and deep. Since I hardly ever deal with them, I’ve never bothered to learn various ways to speed up their cleaning. In this case I sanded, and sanded, and sanded, then polished. I started it at the same time as starting a movie and was still working on it when the movie ended. The result made me feel like it was worthwhile.

Then I moved on to the bowl/cup. Sanded, polished and three coats of wax.

Lastly, the gourd, which was in good shape, but smelled moldy and had some meerschaum stuck to the top rim that had broken off of the bottom edge of the bowl. I did an alcohol soak on the inside and then popped it in a box with an ozone generator overnight. The meerschaum stuck to it didn’t want to come off easily, so I ended up sanding the top rim.



The cork was in good shape, so I did my usual initial application of cork lube. I smear a good coat on the cork, then warm it with a hairdryer. When it’s completely cooled, I apply more lube and let it sit overnight. With only touching up the cork lube rarely, I’ve never had an issue with cork on most pipes ever and I remove the bowls after every smoking to dry the gourds out. The only cork issues I’ve had are with my newest pipes, cork quality has been declining for decades and the crappy pressed cork that is often used in newer ones will occasionally just crumble after a while. I have a Brebbia from the ’90s that is one of my all time favorites that is currently waiting for me to replace the cork on for this reason.



Lastly, a good waxing of the gourd and it’s done. I’ll smoke it for a few days to determine if I like the airflow or not, and make adjustments to it as needed. Here’s the finished pipe-

Cool, I’ll definitely try that next time. I’ve successfully revived the cork on every old calabash I’ve gotten (assuming it wasn’t missing chunks or damaged) when the bowl was loose by steaming the cork until it was fully soaked, letting it dry a couple of days and then applying cork grease.

Nice job, Ted. Looks awesome!

The gourds these are made of have been used as bottles for tens of thousands of years prior to being made into pipes and we steam the gourds every time we smoke the pipes, it doesn’t hurt them in any way to steam them. I’m not a fan of Vaseline on the corks, it blocks moisture too much and reduces the spring back of the cork leading to loose bowls far faster than doing nothing at all in my experience. I use Herco cork grease, I put a picture of it in my post above. It’s made for cork fittings on woodwinds/musical instruments.

A rather small project but I thought I would post it since it’s something I never see discussed. I went through my collection of calabash pipes and decided to put one more into regular use. I picked out this one. Other than a casual cleaning, it needed nothing to start using it and look sharp. I doubt it had been smoked more than once or twice by its original owner.





After the first smoke though, it had an issue that I was expecting with these Andreas Bauer calabashes. Too restrictive airflow. To be fair, this is a personal preference issue to me. For my smoking habits and preferences, I have found that a more free airflow from the bowl vent drastically improves the smoking experience.

Most of these pipes I have have large, tapered chambers. This one is from my Butz Choquin calabash and it has about a 1 1/8” opening and is tapered. For it, I went with adding three additional vent holes as you can see in the photo. I make the holes using a rotary tool fitted with the correct size diamond burr. I never use drill bits on dry meerschaum, they are a sure way to destroy the bowl. After this change, my BC calabash turned out to be one of my best smoking calabash pipes ever.



But back to this pipe. Here is the bowl from the bottom.



The bowl on this pipe is a little different than many. First, it’s narrower, about 7/8”. Second, it’s fairly deep and with the taper, there isn’t much material to make additional holes through without risking them being too high up the bowl. Also in a narrower bowl, I don’t find that additional holes are any improvement over simply increasing the size of the existing vent hole.

When increasing the diameter of an existing hole in meerschaum I don’t use any type of power tool because of the risk of chatter, which could chip or crack the meerschaum. I use a needle file to slowly increase the size of the hole. I also occasionally do this in steps, making it a bit larger, then checking it by smoking it again, then doing more as needed to get it just right and done for good. This is one thing I really like about calabash pipes, the ability to alter the airflow fairly easily to get it just the way I like it. There are other things that can be done to alter the airflow on these that I won’t talk about now since I’m not doing any of them.

Good question. I actually never thought that much about it when I’m doing it. I’m using a flexible shaft tool on my bench for such work and its speed is controlled by a foot pedal. I start fairly slow for establishing the start of the hole. Once it’s started the way I want, I probably use about half speed to cut the hole, doing slow plunges and regularly backing out the burr to clear material/dust. I don’t polish or smooth the edges of the holes, I don’t think it matters and I don’t want to unnecessarily remove material.

Yes. I also have one of the Harbor Freight knockoff versions too that I got when the shaft on my Fordham broke, I bought it because I needed it immediately and couldn’t get a replacement shaft fast enough. The Harbor Freight one cost less than the replacement shaft and is actually excellent. I use both, I keep different size collets in each one.

I had bought the basic dremel tool years back, and when I was doing hazmat waste, there was a ranch store chain where customers would purchase stuff like auto battery chargers and a lot of other neat stuff. People would use it for one time, get their money back claiming it was defective.

I got a dremel 4300 with the flex shaft and a lot of the tools…. Works great, and I saved it from the grave. Not in the league of foredom, but the price was right.

Craftsman tools have always been a great value to me, my big toolbox, all of my wrenches, sockets, most of my screwdrivers, car Jack, Jack stands, creeper, shop stool, retractable extension cord hammer drill…. and other stuff are all craftsman. They have never disappointed and even with a 3 foot cheater bar I stripped my socket wrench internals, no hassle replacement.

Not sure how good the stuff is now though, I think Lowe’s has the rights to all the craftsman products.

The old Craftsman tools were outstanding in my opinion. The majority of my hand tools are old Craftsman and my metal lathe is a Craftsman from 1957. I saw Craftsman tools at my local ACE hardware starting about a year or two ago. I question that the power tools are anything special, the hand tools looked and felt good but I have no illusions they are the same as they once were.

Totally cool, tool and materials discussions definitely fit in with the spirit of this thread.

I bought the set of 6 point gearwrenches at least 20 years ago, they are awesome for tight spots, when I reach for a wrench, it is usually the gear wrench.