Author: Mark Irwin

  I really, really love the look of an unrestored vintage Pete "well-beloved," especially with the patina on the silver looks like it's spent a hundred years or so at the bottom of the sea.  Not a Franken Pete, not some woe-be-gone undead thing that might or might not have been a Peterson, but a genuinely beautiful old pipe with a great patina on the metal, an oxidized yet substantially undamaged (I almost wrote "undamned") P-Lip, some lava on the rim but nothing to indicate the the bowl would need topping. Once again I paid too much an estate simply because I was looking for a good restoration project.  While nothing is so much fun as working on my favorite shape, the 4 / 309, I should have paid more attention to the photos. If I had, I’d have seen the button was chewed on too much to make it much of a clencher in future.  Be that as it may—and the point was driven home by seeing a very similar Pete just two weeks later that was restored for the same price!—I bought it. And my headaches began. The first one was simply seeing how chewed the button was and wondering if I could remove all the dental abrasions without sanding through to the smoke channel. Second was a frozen bone tenon.  That one grew into a migraine proportions.  If a vulcanite tenon is frozen, a night in the freezer will almost always allow you to unseat it. This is the second time that a bone tenon—threaded—refused to budge, which meant I had to drill it out. Only this time the pieces didn’t fall out.  They remained, stubbornly fused to the vulcanite. Third was a deadline: my part of the 1906 catalog was becoming seriously past due, so the mess I’d created was sitting there on the bench every time I walked into the studio. This may have been the biggest one, as there is nothing quite so irksome as wanting to do something then immediately realizing you've got a wall of work separating you from the thing you'd much rather be doing. At that point I was ready to toss the pipe into the fireplace and forget about it.  Instead, I talked to my friend Gary Hamilton, who kindly suggested I send it to him.  I was boxing it up before we finished our conversation, and what you see is his incredible work. Here’s what he did: rethreaded stem for condenser made correct length condenser deep cleaned mortise / reservoir clean & polish stummel bowl coating removed dents from silver mount “The 309 did challenge me on the ‘should I or shouldn’t I’ aspect of the P-Lip.  I so much wanted to reshape and sharpen that button, but as Mark noted, it is very thin and there is not much meat left on the bone to work with.  Reshaping and accidentally cutting an opening into the draft hole would have been devastating.  After much hand wringing, I decided…