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There is nothing quite so frustrating as a Pete with a loose tenon. This doesn’t happen, of course, with a System, but the majority of Petes have what craftsmen in the factory used to call “navy mounts,” probably in contradistinction to the army mount of the System.

I’ve tried everything I could think of to remedy the situation:

—putting drops of water into the mortise to swell the wood, for example. That works. Until the wood dries.

–applying carnauba wax to the tenon.  That works. Until the wax rubs off.

–painting clear finger nail polish on the tenon. That works. Until you pull out and reinsert the tenon, when the finger nail polish all flakes off, most of it crackling down into the mortise.

–wrapping Scotch tape around the tenon.  That doesn’t work.

–heating the tenon with a heat gun and applying pressure to the end to squish it fatter.  That destroyed a beautiful B5 Donegal Rocky sterling’s stem.

–painting CA glue on the tenon. A thin coat.  I’m not EVEN going to tell you how that went.

–hammering a drill bit into what a thought was the softened airway of the tenon.  That cracked the tenon. I was able to use CA glue to make a mostly-invisible repair. And yes, it worked, if you mean the tenon no longer fell out of the mortise. If I was teaching DIY Pipe Repair, I would’ve given myself a D+.

Tightening kit

Then someone suggested I check out the Stem Tightener Kit from Vermont Freehand.  It was $10.  I tried it.  I failed.

I lost it in my workbench drawer for a year or two until I got a really nice Pebble Grain Deerstalker recently, HM “I” for 1994. It was in a lot from a pawnbroker, reinforced by the arrival of the pipes wrapped in paper towels and plastic sacks. How was he to know? How was I to know?

You notice three paragraphs back I wrote “I failed”? I normally pride myself on being a good critical reader, but I obviously didn’t read the instructions, or maybe just didn’t follow them. I should’ve known (but didn’t) that anything Steve Norse at Vermont Freehand works—that is, if the fool on the receiving end knows how to use it. So I went back and read the directions again, this time slowly, as if I were translating a passage of New Testament Greek for my old professor John G. Gammie nearly 50 years ago. . . and, as we’re talking Greek, εὕρηκα! That is to say, EUREKA!

I’m so pleased with myself that I thought we’d go through the whole process together, just in case you ever need to tighten a tenon in a (semi) fool-proof manner and so I can bask in the glow of my little accomplishment.

1 ~ find the narrow end of a pin that fits the airway

Left end: wider. Right end: narrower.

Oh. That means there’s a wide end. Somehow I missed that the first time through the instructions a few years back. These pins are tapered. I selected a pin that went not quite half way in.

Before you proceed, however, you might find it interesting to measure the diameter of the tenon at the end.  This one came out to 11.9 mm. Remember this number.

2 ~ heat tenon slowly until it soften enough to press pin into tin a bit further but not all the way, leave enough pin to grab onto to remove. Heat sources can be; heat gun, hair dryer, candle, lighter, etc.

Reading #2, I know Steve didn’t write these instructions, since he runs the premier pipe tools and materials website in the US, knows the difference between a semicolon and a colon, and also recognizes a comma splice when he sees one. I’d like to think that’s why I had difficulty with this whole procedure (we all know that’s not actually the case). I suspect the directions were outsourced to the same company who writes them for Acme (the company who supplies everything to Wile E. Coyote).

To heat the tenon, use a heat gun. Austin Quinlan has a killer in Nate Lynn’s video a few weeks back, allowing the user to grip it and direct the heat with one hand while rotating the stem with the other.  You can use other sources. I’ve used a tea light and a butane lighter flame, the former being really, really slow and the latter dangerous (I burn the vulcanite before I get it soft enough).  The trick is to remember not to burn the vulcanite. Easier said than done, I know, but if you remember that this heating process will take a few minutes, you’re already ahead of the game.  If you’ve done stem bending, you’re also ahead of the pack. If you can smell the vulcanite, you’re probably in trouble.

A pin vise is the tool you want to insert the pin. Some people hate spending $ on tools when they could be spending it on pipes or tobaccos, and I’m afraid I often fall into that category, so I had to rely on my behemoth pin vice, suitable for hand-drilling System reservoirs and repositioning rebar in concrete.  But you can get a more  elegant, streamlined affair for somewhere between $10 and $15. That way your pipe friends won’t laugh at you when they see it one on the bench (“Oh that? I was installing a pulley to raise the piano to the ceiling and accidentally left it there.”)

With the pin vise, you can push the pin into the tenon. If the tenon is softened, it will go in without much resistance.

3 ~ place tenon and pin into water to cool and set, then remove pin with pliers.

If you’ve done stem bending, you know about the cold water thing. I brought a shallow bowl to the game and found it wasn’t quite deep or wide enough to simply immerse the stem.  I also usually put a few pieces of ice in the water to help the vulcanite cool a bit faster.

Now the genius of using a pin vise (see #2 above) rather than your fingers or a pair of pliers is that you can more easily remove the pin.

Remember I said to measure the tenon end before expanding?  That’s so I could measure it afterwards and get some idea of what happened.  What happened was an expansion of .2 mm.  Which was actually a bit too tight, unless removing the stem with a small pair of channel locks sounds fun.

I didn’t panic.  Or at least, not much.  I remembered that the mortise on an estate pipe is often dirty, and dirt takes up space, space (for example) for a newly-expanded tenon.

So I wrapped some 150 wet/dry flexible sandpaper around the end of a pencil and did a few turns around the dance floor, pausing every now and again to blow out the debris.

And that did the trick.  Tenon tightened, but not too tight.  In fact, exactly-right-tight.

Here endeth the lesson.

Matthew Ramsey CPG recently shared a few pix from an astonishing pair of walnut-cased Late Republic full amber P-Lip Lubinski – Larrigan – Nicholson creations, a 120 dublin and a 6 billiard.  New Old Stock.  These were part of a large special project of Mario Lubinski )of Lubinski.it, the long-standing Italian distributor and “fifth Beatle” of K&P for several decades), Jimmy Nicholson (CEO) and Paddy Larrigan (factory manager) featuring recovered Patent-era full-sized amber P-Lip stems.  Just one more reason to celebrate the Late Republic  in K&P’s production history!

THAT IS ONE FAT TAPERED AMBER STEM.

PEWTER P-LIP TAMPER EVENT

Many thanks to Justin Beale for his generosity in hosting the Pewter P-Lip Tamper Event, and to all who participated! As always, if you want your Certified Pete Geek certificate or just want to add the merit badge to your CPG, just send a photo of it w/your favorite Pete to petegeek1896@gmail.com.

The NPG (Nebraska Pete Geek, aka John M. Young).

John adds:

“Oh, Joy!”

COUNTER-CULTURALLY SPEAKING

Ever grown weary with your doctor’s complaints about your pipe & pint?  Or for that matter, with the cavils and un-ending deprecations of your family as you puff in the garage or out of doors?  If so, you mind find a bit of solace and perhaps clarification of your own position in a recent article, “In Defense of Pipe and Pint,” by our friend Malcolm Guite (see my interview with Malcolm in Post #344).    I just received a print copy of the magazine it’s in, and while I may have mentioned this in an earlier post, I recommend it as worth your time and thought.  It’s available online HERE.