Todd Becker

IMPORTANT PSA AT END OF POST Since I was a kid I’ve had a disability called strabismus, which means I have little depth of vision and tend to run into things or knock things over. For several years after I had eye surgery Mom would take me out of school and after therapy we’d get a chocolate donut at the medical building coffee shop then go to the bookstore where she’d get me a new Fawcett-Crest Peanuts paperback. Looking back, those books were as important in my spiritual formation as my first copy of Good News for Modern Man. I recalled one of them as I was working through today’s refurb, a strip where Linus walks in, happy with himself that he’s polished his own shoes: (February 28, 1957) This strip has always been a lifelong parable for me,*  but what brought it to mind was an estate Pete I bought recently. The online photos led me to believe I was getting a truly outstanding estate only to find that whether by accident or design, only the front of the shoes had been polished!  The chamber had only been reamed halfway down, to give the appearance of having been cleaned out. That made me laugh. The description “cleaned and ready to smoke”—which we read over and over on eBay--was one of those Monster Whoppers cribbed straight from the pen of Mark Twain or Patrick McManus. My thesis this morning is simple: as hobbyists, we can do a far better job than most professionals restoring a pipe to prime smoking condition.  We have the passion, because it’s our pipe, not someone else’s.  We have the time, because we’re not racing against the clock.  I’m not criticizing eBay sellers and online retailers of estate pipes.  Photos often can’t tell the real story and sometimes neither do sellers, for reasons beyond this morning’s essay. If you’re buying an estate System to smoke, there are seven areas that, being wholly are partially invisible, are often not dealt with by a seller: Button clenching shelf crevices oxidized Button dental chatter Chamber airway dirty Chamber airway heel dirty Chamber heel dirty Chamber walls dirty Mortise and reservoir dirty Shank airway lined with tar And this is what today’s 05a Dublin System refurb will address.   Not mine, but Cheyen Lloy'd beautiful 05a Dublin System HM 1975, the earliest I've documented. I’ve talked about the 05a before on PPN; briefly, it has been documented by Cheyen Lloyd CPG to 1975. It first appeared in the ephemera in 1978 and was last seen in the ephemera alongside its replacement the 05b calabash in 1983. (Incidentally, the chubbier 05c, Giacomo Penzo’s revision of the calabash 05b, appeared in 2025.)  For whatever inscrutable reason, while the 05a lacks a reservoir, it’s a great smoker. For myself, I suspect it has to do with the V-shaped chamber, which intensifies flavor as the bowl is smoked. As you can see, once the grime was removed, the bowl is seen to have arrived…