This method was recently shared by Tom T. over at Pondering from Piper's Paradise and I thought I'd help share the knowledge. If you aren't familiar with PFPP, you owe it to yourself to check out their blog. While it has only been up and running since the first of this year, Tom has a great way with words. I'm looking forward to stopping by his shop this spring when I make a trip back to Arkansas on family business. Anyway, here's his discussion about a pipe meeting where they discussed how best to do a pipe cleaning using the Salt Method.:
The discussion of pipe cleaning techniques planned for last night's meeting of The Ozark Pipe Smokers was better than expected, thanks to Vice President Jeff, who prepared a demonstration.
All eyes lit up when Jeff pulled out a (sadly deplenished) bottle of Everclear, but it was not, I repeat, NOT passed around the room for everyone to have a taste. Maybe next time.
The Everclear, which we learned was available in Washington County liquor stores and the Jane, Mo., Walmart, is the basis for the cleaning process. Jeff recommended the use of pipe cleaners, starting with bristled cleaners or bristle brushes, dipped in Everclear and run through the stem. He said he inserts from the tenon at first, because it is easier to get the cleaner back out if the draft hole is too tight.
That process continues in the shank, with a special emphasis on the mortis, where the bowl and the stem meet, which can accumulate large amounts of gunk, especially if the fit between the two pieces isn't exact.
Before adding anything to the bowl, Jeff plugs the shank with an ear plug, the kind at Walgreen's with a string attached. Actually, he said, he also used the string to set the pipe on, helping it stay upright.
Jeff recommended filling the pipe about one-third with Everclear (using an eyedropper to avoid getting alcohol on the outside of the bowl) and then adding sea salt, alternating as needed, until the pipe is full of both. He said he leaves the pipes with the salt/alcohol mixture sitting for at least 24 hours, at which point, he'll scoop out the salt. On rare occasion, he's needed a second treatment, but generally at this point, he is ready to wipe out the bowl with an alcohol-dampened paper towel. He leaves the bowl and stem separated for another 24 hours while they dry.
To polish the outside of the bowl, Jeff recommended Murphy's oil soap, mixed 50/50 with water. It should be applied gently, Jeff said, because it can remove some of the stain. He preferred Halcyon II wax over Paragon or carnauba for the final polish. For lighter jobs, he said he used the Stanwell polishing cloth.
For vulcanite stems, even or especially for heavily oxidized stems, Jeff uses Flitz Metal Cleaner. The blue solution can be worked into the stem, he said, and then the effects continue as it is buffed with a dry portion of terrycloth. Without using much pressure, Jeff returned an oxidized stem to a like-new shine. He said it could take 30 minutes for some stems. He said he has not seen it remove an emblem.
"If you've got faint scratches, it'll take most of your scratch marks off," Jeff said. It does not, however, remove bite marks. He also said it works as a polish and can prevent future oxidation.
For metal bands, he recommended a Sunshine Polishing Cloth after the wood and stem had been taped over using blue painters tape.
During next month's meeting, on Feb. 12, we have chosen to discuss cellaring methods. Bring your stories and suggestions and questions and, if you want to share, your aged tobacco.
Do you have any different ways to perform a salt pipe cleaning?
One side note, were this a meerschaum pipe you were cleaning, you would NOT pour the Everclear (or high alcohol content liquid) directly into the pipe. You would pack with salt and then apply the liquid to the salt. You don't ever want to apply liquid directly into the bowl of your fine meerschaum pipe.
Our two-story yellow house on Sunnyside Avenue, Lansing Michigan, where I grew up in the 1950s through the mid 60s: was our home sweet home. Its big front window looking out onto the quiet street, from our kitchen dinette table, was our reviewing stand of the parade of the few other early risers walking or driving by while we ate our bacon and eggs and cold cereal, listened to ‘Eric-O’ spin out easy-listening music over the radio, and chatted together before starting our day.
There was never a need to hurry with our breakfasts. 6 a.m. was wake up time in the Riggs household, seven days a week. Dad saw to that. Of the six of us in our family, he was the only real morning person. But it just takes the one. That notwithstanding, the benefit was sitting together at table, fully dressed and enjoying a leisurely morning meal without having to gobble something in a hurry on the way out the door.
Our milkman, Jerry (who must not have had a last name), arrived in his milk wagon, pulled by Tom, a large chestnut gelding. This was the last horse drawn milk wagon in the city of Lansing. Dad’s pop used to drive horse drawn dairy wagons, owned his own dairy, too.
While mom took the quart bottles from Jerry at the side door, Tom took his regular dump on the street. My brothers Gary and Phil, and I, looked up from our breakfasts to point at the steaming heap on the pavement and have a joke at our older brother Tom’s expense.
“Uh-oh! Tom left his grunty on the street, again!”
Our big brother glowered across the table at us with a threatening look. Mom, who had returned to her place at table moaned and demanded we not use ‘that word’ while she was trying to eat.
“Mind your manners and turn around,” dad said. “Finish your breakfasts while they’re still hot.”
We obeyed. Our backs were to the window, but mom and dad’s places faced it; mom focused on her food, but dad looked at the manure in the center of the street while he finished his coffee. The lady who lived kitty-corner from our house, right on schedule, came out in her robe with her coal shovel, and began to scrape up the precious brown gold to take back to her prizewinning roses. Dad nudged mom, who looked up at the neighbor with her smelly plunder, and chuckled and shook her head. Dad’s face broke into that dangerous grin of his.
“Just to see the look on her face,” he laughed, “I’d like to run out there with my own shovel and scoop it up before she gets to it.”
“Don’t you dare!” mom laughed back, her disapproving, threatening laugh.
Our dad was possessed of a mischievous imp who devised little schemes to get the rise out of friends, neighbors, and perfect strangers. But he was mostly content to speak them out in our presence, just to get the rise out of mom. He had inherited the trait from his pop, who on his part took ‘Don’t you dare’ as the signal to go ahead. He had always lived for danger.
Turning to look out the window at the neighbor lady with her load, I saw her pause as old Mr. Buck, our neighbor up the block from us appeared at curbside. His pipe in one hand, and a beach pail and scoop in the other, he appeared to be asking for her to share the wealth with him. With a grudging nod of assent, she watched anxiously as he ladled his small allotment into his pail, as if he might take the whole pile and pack it away in his tiny vessel.
“It’s little enough fertilizer for those roses he grows next to his house,” mom said. “She doesn’t need to worry that Mr. Buck will show up her blooms at any garden show.”
“Maybe he’s not going to use them for his roses at all,” dad said with a grin. “Remember what Uncle Will told us about what he used horse manure for.”
Mom looked forlornly at her half-eaten breakfast. “I think I’d like to be excused,” she said.
“What did he use horse manure for?” We had to know. Mom didn’t, and gave her plate to Mitzi, our scavenging dachshund. She went to work on the skillet at the sink, while we ‘men’ leaned in at the table to hear that new page added to our family history. And who knew? It might be something we could share at ‘show and tell’ in school.
“When Uncle Will was just a young man in England,” dad explained, “he had a job mucking out horse stables. Well, he’d saved a little money for a pipe, but didn’t make enough yet to buy tobacco. So he packed it with dried horse manure as a tobacco substitute. This seemed to be the next best thing to the real article, and he even got compliments from people about how nice it smelled when he lit it up. Finally after a few years he started making good money as a house painter. He could afford a nicer pipe and some good, real English tobacco. Only he found out it tasted about the same as his old dried horse manure. He was too proud to go back to that, but still too frugal to spend money on good tobacco he didn’t enjoy any more than the manure he could get for free, so he gave it up.”
“Did he throw away his pipe?” I asked. As one of the middle children in the family, I lived off of hand-me-downs. I had hoped Great Uncle Will might let me have his pipe, since he’d had no use for it now for nearly fifty years, even though I was only eight, and growing up in a non-smoking family.
Mom paused from her scouring the skillet at the sink with a dreamy look on her face. “My dad smoked a pipe,” she said. “He liked Rum and Maple, I remember. It smelled so nice, like seasoned wood and toasted sweet rolls.”
“Horse manure smells nice,” my little brother Phil maintained. He liked everything about horses, and at five years of age, reveled in the knowledge that his name meant ‘lover of horses’.
“I heard that English tobacco is actually seasoned over a slow fire of smoldering horse manure,” dad went on.
“Really, Seymour!” mom protested. “Using…ugh…to roast something % This subject over breakfast is going on a bit too far.”
It was, and it didn’t show signs of stopping.
“You like watching ‘Wagon Train’ on TV, mom,” big brother Tom began making a point. He was good at this. I always imagined him using his incisive wit to become a trial lawyer. “Well, where did the women get fuel for their cooking fires out there on the prairie? They didn’t have any trees to get firewood, but with all their horses and oxen, the women had to use what they left behind. It was their job to follow behind the wagons with their kids and pick up the manure and let them dry out in the back of the wagons. And there were plenty of already dried buffalo chips—“
“Buffalo chips, mmm!” Phil added, smacking his lips, and my twin brother Gary snorted.
That was enough. Mercifully for mom, it was time for us to get ready to go off for school and dad for work.
Mr. Buck’s interest in the manure had really just been for the roses he and his wife grew along the side of their house beside their driveway. I knew he was a Sir Walter Raleigh man. I recognized the striped pouch from the TV commercials. Guys in plaid flannels brandishing their pipes, singing about how grand it smelled, how right it packed, how sweet it tasted, and how it couldn’t bite, as their bird dog’s tail beat time to the music. I wanted to ask him if it really tasted as sweet as the commercials said. I knew it smelled grand. All pipe tobaccos smelled grand, though I wasn’t so sure about the English stuff dad told us about.
But I was still recovering from my rebuff from our next-door neighbor Mr. Burgess, a cigarette smoker, when in regard to the promises of so many cigarette commercials, I wanted to know what a cigarette tasted like (Did it really taste good like a cigarette should? Did he remember how great cigarettes used to taste? Was he smoking more now and enjoying it less? If so, was he going to switch to______? Or would he rather fight than switch? If so, and I suggested he switch to _______, would he really fight me, a little kid?)
In answer to just the first question, he snapped, “It doesn’t taste good, and don’t let me catch you smoking a cigarette!”
Well who said I was going to anyhow? You’d think I’d done something wrong the way he talked to me. But he was probably just sore because he was doing it all the wrong way. After all, in the commercials, all the cigarette smokers were happy because they had found the right cigarette, and the pretty who shared his cigarettes thought so too. You saw a lot of pretty s in cigarette commercials. Seemed they couldn’t sell cigarettes without a pretty . But they sure could sell pipe tobacco without one. A dog with a good sense of rhythm was optional. Though I never saw Mr. Buck singing about how much he loved his pipe tobacco, he sure looked like he was enjoying it more than Mr. Burgess enjoyed his cigarettes.
I knew even then that all commercials promised more than their products could deliver. But still at that early age, I had begun to cultivate my powers of deduction of certain clues that linked the illusion of TV ads to real life. The actors portrayed smoking cigarettes seemed always to be good looking, image conscious, and especially, young. The pipe guys appeared more interested in their contentment with their pipes than anything else, and while they seemed to be all ages, they were more usually older and more mature. In real life, you didn’t seem to see a lot of old cigarette smokers, not as much as you saw old pipe smokers. Even my non-smoking parents cast a benevolent eye towards somebody with a pipe than the very idea of cigarette smoking.
My folks were very careful about the kind of literature that came into our house. And as a veteran Scoutmaster, my dad gave his wholehearted stamp of approval to the Boys’ Life Magazine, whose pages championed the wholesomeness of values for American boys. It was a big, thick monthly publication, full of profusely illustrated articles, stories, and activities. And despite the disparaging view generally held by grownups of the corrupting effects of comic book reading, their color comic section had our parents’ unqualified seal of acceptance. Two of the regularly featured comics’ characters consistently appeared every month, smoking their pipes: as much a part of them as their roles they played for their grandsons or their young friends. Various other appearances of dads or leaders depicted the pipe as the presence of maturity or wisdom for their young people to look up to as well. It was never met with any hand-wringing objections by even the most straight laced of the older set of that day. No one read, in these depictions, any compromising of the morality or well being of America’s youth. Even American Scouting’s most notable interpreter in oils on canvas, Norman Rockwell, was as well known for his pipe as for his artist’s brush. There seemed a sort of rightness with the world about these men with their pipes. Who could find fault with that? I mean, besides the censorious neurotics of this day’s ‘age of tolerance’?
Late fall of the year 1962, our Scout troop had its monthly weekend campout at the edge of a pasture. Across the road from our encampment was a cornfield where stalks of corn stood unharvested as a winter food supply for the wildlife. It was too much of a temptation for all of us boys to forage the materials to fashion our own corncob pipes. Some were even bold enough to load their cobs with corn silk and experiment with their first smoke. But I had only gotten so far as hollowing out a cob and inserting a length of stalk for the stem. We returned to light our fires to cook our lunches: hamburger patties, onions, sliced carrots and potatoes, wrapped in aluminum foil. When the fires got going really well, we placed our foil packets with care into the fire, fifteen to twenty minutes on each side. The stand of trees along the pasture provided all the wood we needed for our weekend campfires. But the more adventurous among us gathered a supplementary fuel supply of the dried manure from the pasture. That story my brother Tom had shared years before at our family breakfast table came back to me, and I was eager to touch with the roots of our frontier forebears and the means they used for cooking their meals. Tossing a couple dried cowpies into the flames produced an instantaneous and pleasing result. They ignited quickly into flame, like the paraffin and paper-roll firebugs we carried in our packs for rainy days, and lasted for as long as a well-seasoned wood log would do. Not so pleased were some of the more delicate campers, upon whose foil bundles our cowpies had landed. They preferred to eat their food raw instead of living with the idea of having a meal cooked with cowflop.
One of our requirements for advancement we were supposed to work on that weekend was to construct a handy gadget from natural materials, showing our resourcefulness and our use of our knives. Then we were to demonstrate their usefulness to one of the Senior Scouts or the Scoutmaster. Mostly these gadgets were simple and unoriginal; fire tongs being the most common tool, made of a stout green stick with its middle whittled down halfway so it could be doubled over as a hinge and could be used to retrieve the foil packets out of the fire. The more industrious fellows constructed a sort of frying pan with a long green stick bent in a loop with a handle, and stretched their foil over the loop. Laying their food onto the foil pan, they held it over the flames to fry their meat, and with the fat, fried their taters and onions and carrots, too. Our Scoutmaster—my dad—oversaw these demonstrations at our cooking fire. Meanwhile, as I waited for my lunch to finish cooking, I unconsciously produced my makeshift corncob pipe and hollowed the bowl a little more with my jackknife.
“That your camp gadget?” my dad asked sarcastically, looking at the pipe in my hand.
“Yeah,” I replied, not looking at him. I was keeping my eye on my lunch on the fire. “I wanted to do something more than just fire tongs.”
“Yeah, wise guy,” he said, beginning to fume just a little at my failure to register the subtle reproach in his tone of voice. “You didn’t mean to demonstrate its use to me?”
“Oh, yeah!” I said enthusiastically. “I even tried some of that with it to get it going.” I pointed to the pile of dried manure lying beside the fire. “It lights real well.”
“Now, look here—!” he began.
Not thinking what I was doing, I put the pipe in my mouth to free my hand. I took out my fork and turned the hamburger and vegetables in my green stick and foil frying pan, and tested to see if they were ready to eat.
“Done to a T,” I crowed.
My dad’s face flushed with a wave of mirth at his pudd’n-headed number two son. “All right, General MacArthur, spit that corncob into the fire and eat your lunch.”
I’ve had a lot of corncob pipes since then that have lasted longer than that one did. Time enough for me to get choosier about what goes into it. Something wholesome.
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Jerry “B.P.” Riggs is an author who’s latest work “Sherlock Holmes, Return to the Musgrave Ritual” is available currently. You can order this, or any of his books for $15.95 + $5.00 s&h (96 cents tax for MI residents) by sending a check or money order to: 303 S. Norton St. Corunna MI 48817. Please use the Contact Form on this blog to contact the author.
