Pipe mud

Early last October I woke up and after saying my J. R. R. Tolkien prayer (“Thank you, Lord, for another 24 hours to smoke my pipe”), I began wondering how hard it would be to replicate K&P’s current bowl coating formula. It’s just a mixture of activated charcoal powder, food-grade gum arabic and water. How hard could it be? As soon as I’d made my first batch and literally tasted a bit of success, I began to wonder if this stuff might not be a kind of universal bowl panacea, a genuine “all purpose bowl coating” (APBC), something that would do these six things: correct potential burn-outs; fill and patch “spider-webbing” (the veiny lines sometimes seen in the reamed bowl of an estate pipe indicating heat damage); raise a chamber floor where high drilling is causing “wet heel” (extreme dampness in the bottom of the bowl, resulting in a hot smoke and unsmoked tobacco); freshen estate Petes with dirty or ghosted chambers; use as pre-carb for NOS Petes with stained chambers (whether new Naturals or new/old stock); use as pre-carb for NOS Petes with chambers treated with K&P’s old vegetable-base paint. I treated and smoked at least two pipes in each category (although some were overlapping) to determine whether the APBC was an unqualified success, qualified success or simply didn’t work. I know this isn’t science, but it gave me enough data to determine whether I was on the right track in each scenario and report to you for your consideration and advice.  In what follows, First, I'll detail each of the problems and what kind of success I had, then conclude with the recipe, preparation steps I used and some overall observations.   Routine Chamber Problems 1. Potential Burn-Outs. Most everyone knows I used to be known as The Human Torch, King of Burn-Outs. I’m safely past such problems, but one thing hundreds of hours on the therapist’s couch hasn’t cured me of is my distaste for cigar ash pipe mud. The taste was fine when I smoked English tobaccos and I can still get through it with something like MacBaren Mixture Flake, but with virginia tobaccos it’s a last resort for me. I made two attempts to use the APBC on potential burnouts with one success and one failure. Both chambers had  a smallish gray spot which, with my keenly trained eye, I’ve come to recognize as a potential pipe killers. On both pipes, when I applied the APBC directly to the burnout patch, the coating burned away revealing the burnout spot after just one bowl. This shape 4 had multiple bowl issues. An original burn-out spot had already been treated with cigar-ash pipe mud. The cake had become quite uneven as well. My first attempt—applying APBC just to the potential burn-out spot, failed.  Sanding out the entire chamber revealed not one, but three problem areas. APBC only remedied two of the three. Here as in the other jobs, I sanded out the entire chamber, leveling the chamber…