tightening a tenon

  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…