Oil curing!

[Ocelot55]

Has anyone tried it? Is it a gimmick, or is there something to it? I certainly enjoyed breaking in my Ashtons and Dunhills.

How would one go about oil curing a stummel?

[PremalChheda]

I think the current pipemakers that do oil cure keep it fairly private. Lee Von Erck & Joe Nelson are the 2 that I know of. You can look up patents that Dunhill filed, and it explains their entire process.

[bregolad]

I was intrigued by the existence of these patents, and the intarwebz promptly yielded this:
http://www.folloder.com/pdf/1341418.pdf

[Sasquatch]

I fooled with it for awhile.

Here is my quick rundown, you can use or not use whatever you like.

Oil curing occassionally makes a really wonderful pipe. But.... there's lots of really wonderful pipes out there that are not oil cured. And there's plenty of totally mediocre smokers out there that ARE oil cured - I had a gurgling Wiley and an o/c Radice that performs .... pretty much like any other pipe.

Things oil curing does do: makes a totally consistent flavor profile on your product. Adds some panache.

Things oil curing does not do: make a poor pipe a good one. Make briar "clean" - it doesn't "remove impurities", and any lightening of the final product is due not to removal of some mysterious globs of sap, but the baking out of any residual water - not due to the oil curing so much as the heat curing (which curiously is what Sasieni used to do sans oil).

You have a basic choice in oils - some harden, some don't. Sandblasting basically came about as a means of scraping the hard residue of oils off the Dunhill stummels (leading me also to believe that only Shell briars were oil cured and the smooths never were). If you choose a hardening oil, some stays in the wood. If you choose a non hardening oil, you must drive it out of the briar from inside - the heated peg idea. Otherwise the pipe will bleed oil for the first... half dozen or so smokes.

Oils that taste good or neutral are preferred. Oils with a high burn temperature (ie a high "smoke temp") are preferred. Candidates include but are not limited to linseed (boiled or not), flax, grapeseed, pine seed, olive, and curiously in the Dunhill document, "mineral oils" are mentioned.

Radice did a cold soak, I had better luck with impregnation in a hot bath and used a hot oven method after to boil out the oil, as it were, and wiped and wiped and wiped.

My results with various temperatures, oils, and woods were very mixed. I have a single pipe that smokes absolutely perfect. I sent out some testers - one was a winner, big time. Couple others were losers, just as big time. Oily, shitty tasting pieces of crap that took Nightcap and made it taste like Peanut M&Ms. Some shank failures were noted - the briar is weakened/stressed at a certain temperature. This is also mentioned in Sasieni propaganda from early days - lots of broken stummels, but any pipe that survived was a guaranteeable product.

So. Go at it. I would suggest flax and grapeseed oils as a good place to start. Actual process will vary, as will your results.

My results are... I buy good clean briar from vendors who boil and cure it reasonably well, and I don't fart around with oil curing anymore. But. I did get a couple of absolutely MAGIC pipes out of it.

[JonBood]

Thanks for the input Sas!
Very informative as usual=)

[Ocelot55]

Excellent info. I'd like to fool around with it. I might buy some pre-turned stummels for an experiment.

[The Smoking Yeti]

I'll be a test subject if you like. Ol' Haddo and I can go at it together!