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I'm still trying to figure this out. I've used old wine corks, new corks and trying to be extremely cautious but the corks bleed and being extra cautious still often gets a bit of stain in the tobacco chamber.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

I don’t .
I am pretty careful but some always gets beyond the bevel into the chamber proper. Almost the last thing I do is to sand the bowl.
DocAitch

A cork will only make it worse. Be careful and then sand the bowl afterwards.

Or of course use a bowl coat if you can handle the screams of agony from certain buyers.

One more data point for "sand the bowl". It's one of the last steps on all pipes I make, just before coating the bowl. Other than that, just be careful with stain application. The only time I put a cork in the bowl is when I'm going to sandblast it.

Thanks! Will do from now on.

Can someone explain to me about coating the bowl? What do you use for this? I see some high end pipes in which the bowl looks a grayish color.

n80 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 12, 2019 10:05 pm Can someone explain to me about coating the bowl? What do you use for this? I see some high end pipes in which the bowl looks a grayish color.

There's tons of different recipes out there, using all sorts of stuff like honey, sour cream, ...
But the basic gist of it is you want to mix pure carbon powder with something sticky that dries up hard but doesn't leave a taste or goes "off", but is safe when dry.

The most basic mix is waterglass (sodium silicate) mixed with pure carbon powder.

Thanks Massis but that went right over my head. I'll do some more research.

If a pipe is for my own use (verses a new pipe for a customer) will simply smoking it a few times do the same thing?

bowl coating is ment to help form cake and to protect the bowl from possible burn in. But there's just as many pipes out there without any coating that do just fine.

The old way used to be to smoke a pipe filled for only 1/4 the first 5 times, then half full , then 3/4 before finally filling it completely, as to slowly build a cake.

But I've also smoked many pipes on bare wood from day 1 as if they'd been broken in, and had zero problems.

From my perspective, a bowl coating serves two purposes - aesthetics, and consistency. It makes a pipe look more "finished" to lots of collectors, and a lot of collectors have come to expect it. Several years ago there was a flap about it being used to hide flaws in the briar, but that quickly died down once the person claiming it was shown the error of their proclamations.

It also, depending on your recipe, can even out the first several smokes in terms of flavor, while providing a base for cake to take hold - speeding up that process. I do not subscribe to the idea of using honey, molasses, grape jelly (no, really, I've seen that), or other sugar-based binders to hold things together. I understand the idea behind buttermilk or sour cream (or creme fraiche), but I have found them to be a poor binder, resulting in loss of the coating.

In the end, to coat or not to coat is up to the pipe maker, but I do suggest you take the intended audience into account, look at the pipes in that market, and make the decision that best matches your intentions.

Thanks Kurt. At this point I'm just doing this for fun and do not have any intended audience. But I'm really enjoying the process and want to keep learning as much as I can. Is there a 'standard', or better yet, a very simple way to do this for a raw beginner?

I use sanding mandrels, chamber shaped dowels with a slit to anchor the paper. These can be used by hand or chucked into the lathe. RawKrafted has some neat ones made if metal if you want to make the investment. I use 1” and 3/4” oak dowels and custom make them when L need a different size.

These mandrels have a piece of lag bolt as a shaft to use in a hand drill, but that is not needed if you chuck the wood directly into your lathe chuck

I found a video by member Latakialover (George?) showing the use of charcoal powder and sodium silicate to repair a burnt chamber. Is this the same process as you would use on a new pipe?

pretty much, but there is, I think, the substantive concern that the sodium silicate/ carbon mix forms an impermeable barrier which blocks both the ebb and tide of moisture during smoking, and any contribution to the flavor of the smoke that briar might contribute.
Several makers therefore favor more organic, water soluble matrices for the carbon.
DocAitch

So there have been several organic recommendations mentioned but not recommended. Anyone have a preferred organic matrix?

Any or all of: carbon from a pharmacy (vets also have on hand), pumice, buttermilk, sugar, honey, gelatin.

I understand the carbon part. I have found food grade charcoal powder on Amazon. But it seems like no one wants to endorse one specific binder (other than Latakialover - sodium silicate) and most responses are either what some people use or what people don't recommend.

I'll experiment. The pipes I'm making now do not have any value other than time and materials. I don't want to mess any of them up but if I do it will not be a big loss by any means.

If water soluble binders will work....is there anything wrong with water?

The objection to some food binders ( egg white, yogurt, honey etc) is that they can become moldy or otherwise subject to bacteria etc.
Gelatin seems to be less subject to contamination because it has no carbohydrates. I personally haven’t tried it.
Right now, my customers seem to prefer raw, sanded briar.
DocAitch