Dunmore line

In the dreary Virginia winter of 1996, I had just finished the oral defense of my Ph.D. I found myself cast adrift on the icy seas of unemployment with no job prospects.  Not even a commencement exercise to give me symbolic closure to what had been some terrifically difficult years. Leave it to my best friend and wife to make the best of an intolerable situation to surprise me with a remarkable graduation present far beyond our means: a Sherlock Holmes Watson. It was my first SH pipe and it was—and is—a favorite. This is the 1st-issue 1991 HM Marie gave me. Aren't the lines of the original Watson gorgeous? They've changed a bit in bowl and stem since it was first introduced, haven't they?   I dedicated the Watson to smoking all manner of English, Balkan and Orientals for the next twenty years or so—eventually finding employment—and it delivered some great smokes. Then a year came when I underwent some seismic vocational stress, enough that I look back now and call it trauma, and my taste for those types of tobaccos simply vanished. Like many, I had smoked my Balkan Sobranie and Bengal Slices during the cooler months, but now I found I couldn’t stomach anything that didn’t offer the sweet solace of virginia—2015, St. James Flake, Blackwoods Flake, Dark Star, FVF, Christmas Cheer and more. So Poor Watson languished, gathering dust, tarnish and oxidation, until one day I woke up to the fact that I might simply clean the bowl with the old-reliable alcohol soak and try smoking virginias in it. Which I did, only to discover to my horror that the pipe smoked wet and, what’s more, suffered from a wet heel. What happened?It seemed that in switching from English and Balkans to virginia and vapers, the higher sugar content of the latter weren’t playing friendly with the Watson as it was engineered. Condensate from the virginias drawing up from airway into the graduated bore of the P-Lip found nowhere to drop and so spilled over the dimple divot in the mortise, down the airway into the heel of the chamber. As I understand it from what I’ve read in Chuck Stanion’s article on tongue bite and elsewhere, the moist tobacco in the heel not only caused more water vapor but hotter temperatures and more relights. What to do? And I could hear Holmes saying to me, "Think, man! Convert it to a System!"Since the Watson is a full-bent P-Lip pipe with a thick shank, it is certainly System-ready. Moreover, there are for historical precedents for this in the long history of K&P engineering: First, most of the “Navy” mount (traditional tenon & mortise) three-quarter or full-bent P-Lip Petes before the 1960s that I’ve examined have not only step-down deep tenons reservoirs. I call these Sub-Systems in the Pete book, because they operate just like the traditional System but without the army mount. Second, in 1990 K&P issued two SH Systems, as most self-respecting Pete Geeks can…