Author: Mark Irwin

PSA Tá Críosd ar éirigh! – Go deimhin, tá e ar éirigh!     It gives me real delight on this glorious Easter Sunday morning to bring a post by Scott Forrest CPG.  Scott has been part of the Pete Geek community for a number of years and, as you may know, is one of the foremost Peterson collectors in the world, concentrating on everything before 1963.  This spring Scott has brought us documentary proof of the historical Dublin scholar behind the Thinking Man icon (Post #449), which greatly enhanced the commentary to Peterson's Patent Pipes The Historic 1906 Catalog--which we'll be launching at the Chicago Pipe Show two weeks from now. He's also lent his considerable knowledge for that project in determining how Thomas H. Mason's pipe photography was rendered for the printer.  But now a great DIY from Scott--"Shank Crack Repair for Dummies"!   Scott Forrest's SHANK CRACK REPAIR FOR DUMMIES The following describes how I recently repaired a pipe with a shank crack. I received a very nice little 1976 20S Silver Cap that appeared to have been barely smoked. The ferrule slipped off easily to reveal a wide crack that ran almost to the bottom of where that ferrule had been. Normally I clean such cracks and then apply two clamps - one to close the crack and another, perpendicular to the first, to keep the shank from splitting. This has always worked great in the past, but for this particular pipe it did not close the crack. The problem turned out to be that the top half of the crack was actually a missing chip. Unfortunately, once I had a workable plan, I was so excited about completing the job that I did not document the process. I decided that the process needed to be documented, so I found another pipe with a cracked shank, and I’ll describe below what I did to repair it. In preparing for the 20S repair, I went to the hardware store and found a white plastic ring with two areas that stuck out. It looked like the perfect solution, since it could be tightened with a screw, and that area would not touch the CA glued crack; but, when I tried to tighten the clamp with a screw and nut, it wouldn’t get tight enough to even make the crack budge - the screw eventually began tearing through the hole. I then tried a zip tie over the plastic ring clamp. That also failed to tighten enough. So I went back to the hardware store and asked an employee to do my thinking for me. She suggested a metal hose clamp. I had avoided metal clamps because they would scratch the wood, but then I got the idea to put the white plastic clamp beneath it, first cutting off the extended ends. The metal clamp would then go over the plastic and neither would touch the crack while the glue was drying. With this new contraption, the repair was…