![]() Mulling the damage over in my mind, I began cleaning up the pipe, starting with a wipe-down with alcohol on cotton pads. The stress of repeated expansion and contraction of the briar through use was probably sufficient to pull the briar apart along the line of this natural flaw. In this case, however, I am fairly certain that the crack follows a natural weak spot in the briar – a San Andreas Fault, if you will, creeping through the plateau. Accidental outward pressure on the mortise walls can easily crack the thin briar here. Shank cracks are often caused by a moment of carelessness when removing or replacing the stem. It was quite long, perhaps an inch and a half in length. Turning the pipe over, the crack is easy to see, snaking its way down the plateau briar. It looks like a small wedge of briar had also fallen out. This shot without the flash shows more details of the crack from the mortise end of the pipe. I took this shot of the mortise to highlight the crack at the 6 o’clock position, but the flash also illuminated some serious muck lurking inside the shank. The inner rim had a few tiny nicks and the chamber was caked with a soft, almost wet carbon layer. ![]() The rim of the volcano shaped bowl, ironically, was lava-free, showing only a light film of combustion debris from regular smoking. The stem was oxidized with a bit of tooth chatter and calcium buildup, but should clean up just fine. ![]() ![]() It is a beautiful piece, with a graceful organic flow and lovely straight grain underneath the grease. The pipe arrived on my worktable in good, but a little grimy, condition. This Design Berlin Shirwitz Volcano has the characteristic long stem of the genre, but there would be no fitting a standard shank band to this beautiful piece of briar. I’ve repaired quite a few cracked shanks, but this pipe would prove to be a unique challenge.Īs you can see in the pics below, this is not your ordinary churchwarden pipe. I was contacted recently by a DadsPipes reader with a request to look at his favourite pipe and determine what could be done to repair a crack running up the shank. ![]()
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February 2023
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