308. Rim Beveling and Chamber Advice from the Pros on A Late Republic X220
The CPG Pipes have been completed and are enroute to their SPC and SPEu destinations for processing. I’m hoping they will be ready around November 1st – 7th. I will send a link to each Pete Geek who ordered a pipe to the appropriate site for check out. After receiving your pipe, if you want a CPG certificate or Merit Badge to add to your existing certificate, send a photo of yourself with your pipe or your pipe against its box and bag to petegeek1896@gmail.com. This morning I've got two easy DIY techniques new to me, one from pipe refurbishing master Steve Laug and the other from world-class pipe artisan and head of SPC's Estate Pipes division Adam Davidson. If you’ve followed the blog for long, you know I enjoy simple pipe restorations, ones that can be done on a table top in your apartment or flat without raising the hackles of its other inmates and within the reach of almost any pipe smoker. I’m drawn to well-beloved, dirty pipes that are sound under the grime, ones that need cleaning, deoxidation, a bit of sandpaper and buffing. I fell in love with this X220 Kildare as soon as I saw the gigantic elephant trunk of a stem. I suppose it’s why I have a soft spot for the 339s, original 9BC, John Bull 999, SH Hopkins and other chubby Petes. The stem is simply so Irish, so gigantic when compared to English pipes. As the Kildare line only appeared in 1965, the pipe can’t date before then and like the XL339 may well have been made sometime in the 1970s or even early s’80s. When the pipe arrived and I could take a good look at it, I saw it had been reamed and partially cleaned before selling—something I see quite a lot of in eBay’s estate Petes. I always like to take digital photos and look at them on my computer—the digital darkroom—to make an accurate assessment of what a pipe needs. By "darkroom" I don't mean you need a commercial-grade Photoshop set up. Just having a cellphone with a good camera can really help. This photo was taken with an iPhone 13 Pro, which I often use to do micro nature photography.The big thing with a phone camera is to make sure you've got some good lighting and a steady hand. In the photo above you can see where the previous steward’s pen knife had cut into the inner rim as well as a small meteor shower on the reverse rim. The photo below shows where knocking the pipe out has rounded down the edges. I'll say this for him, he achieved a really uniform knocking, beating it all the way around the rim. When you see an estate with these kinds of issues, you know you’re dealing with a “previous gen” pipe—no one from the 1990s onward deals with their pipes in this manner, which seems almost barbaric to us but which was typical for most briar…