Posts Tagged ‘tobacco’

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Zippo Vaporlock

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

It’s actually referred to as a “gas lock” by Zippo. I’ve had the case to my Zippo for nearly 30 years, but the insert’s been replaced multiple times, including once with a butane insert. But what I have now, is not surprisingly a pipe insert. The “chimney” is mostly closed on the top, and there are two large circle openings on either side for the flame when the lighter is turned sideways. You set one of the openings on the rim of the pipe, and draw down into your tobacco.

080927 Zippo 1080927 Zippo 2080927 Zippo 3080927 Zippo 4

Lately, my Zippo has gotten stubborn about lighting. It was taking me 10-20 tries to get it lit, although I knew the flint and wick were fine and there was plenty of fuel. Finally, I thought of a car engine vaporlock, and how the car would sputter, if start at all. So I did a little search and came up with this.

This is from the little manual that comes with a Zippo. “When using your Zippo lighter indoors, open the lid and raise the lighter upward before flicking the wheel This upward movement eliminates gas lock which could prevent lighting on the first zip.”

When the lid is closed the fuel from the wick evaporates and is collected inside the cap. When the cap is opened, that evaporated fuel doesn’t allow any oxygen to reach the wick allowing it be ignited by the spark.

When you go to light your Zippo you should move your hand upward slightly. This movement will push oxygen into the chimney. Another option you can do is to blow lightly into the chimney before you first attempt to light your Zippo.

The new Zippo fuel in the black container does not impart any flavor to your smoke.

By the way, I met a guy once who said he gave up his Zippo because it would “burn” his skin when it was in his pocket. This happens when there’s excess fluid on the outside of the lighter, and the fluid comes in contact with the skin.

There’s an easy way to avoid this. Fill the lighter. Try to avoid overfilling, but if you can’t, you can’t. Close the lighter and rinse it in water or wipe it down with a damp cloth. This cleans the fuel off the outside of the case. Dry your hands, but don’t overdry them, in case you do something stupid. Open the lighter, and flick the spark wheel. If you’ve overfilled it, a huge flame will erupt. Keep the case open, and allow the flame to burn down to a less than insane level. Close the lighter, and wipe it down or rinse it again. Set it on it’s side on a towel to dry. This allows any additional excess fuel to evaporate off of the case.

Oh, the stupid part? I wiped down the case once but got some of the fluid on my fingers. When I went to light the thing, I caught my hand on fire. Fortunately, the damp skin protected me, but it was a bizarre moment looking at all my fingers on fire. This is why I’m an idiot. Keep that in mind when you’re following any instructions I give you.

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Kirsten Pipe Review

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

storefrontAbout, say, 6 months ago, I bought a Kirsten pipe directly from their brick-and-mortar store in Seattle on Nickerson street. What’s cool about the Kirsten is that you can “build it yourself” using pipe components they provide. The pipe is very unique, using a radiator stem to dissipate heat, and any liquids generated from smoking are captured in the stem as well. This is usually the liquids created when the pipe tobacco is moist, and the moisture condenses as the tobacco burns. Nobody wants to say “drool,” but you get the idea. Think of the burble you may hear while smoking your regular pipe. If you’re familiar with brass instruments, like bugles, there’s a “spit valve” that can be used to drain the pipe and if you don’t have time to drain the pipe, the valve can be turned so no liquids get into and escape out of the bowl.

I went to the store instead of ordering online since it wasn’t that far from where we live, and there’s something viscerally satisfying handling a pipe instead of looking at it online. Especially when it’s a funky pipe like the Kirsten. The store was comfortably cozy and not brightly lit, but had a large window providing additional light. The majority of the store is actually made up of smoking accessories and other pipes, but the Kirsten pipes are in the front case.

basic Kirsten designThese are the four basic components of the pipes: the stem, the mouthpiece, the bowl, and the valve. The first three can be intermingled for the most part to create the pipe, but the valve depends on the style of the stem. There are also smaller parts that may eventually need replacing. This includes screws, adapters and “o” rings. Just guessing here, but I’m thinking that the “o” rings would wear out first. As it is, these rings should last a long time.

After playing with the parts for an hour while my wife rolled her eyes, I chose a quarter-bent stem with a large bulldog meerschaum. My thoughts were that this combination should make for an extremely cool smoke, and it does just that. However, on hindsight, because of the slightly different characteristics of Kirsten bowls, the bulldog meerschaum is starting to remind me of a toilet bowl. All it needs is a little water tank. It doesn’t occur to most people, but I think it’s kind of odd. According the Kirsten website, the meerschaum bowls are carved, not pressed.

It’s a great smoke, but the stem’s a little strange looking, like Falcon pipes.

Perhaps I’ve mentioned this, but I smoke hot. That’s why I wanted to try the Kirsten. Because I smoke hot, the smoke itself is cool because of the stem design and meerschaum bowl, but I gotta tell you, that stem gets hot! I end up gripping the mouthpiece, because it’s the only part of the pipe that stays at a comfortable temperature when I start puffing like a choo choo train.

mouthpieceThe mouthpiece is interesting. It serves a function beyond just drawing the smoke. It actually has a ramrod extension, and it’s to accommodate cleaning the stem. You want to drain the stem before you clean it. This gets a 10 on the gross factor. You pull out the stem, and tip the pipe forward, and way more goop comes out than you’d imagine. You look at it and think, “Holy crap! That’s what’s stuck in my regular pipes when I smoke!” To clean the stem, you disassemble the stem, leave the valve out, wad a tissue into the stem, and use the ramrod to push the tissue all the way through the stem. It’s like cleaning the barrel of a gun.

The mouthpiece presents a challenge to the normal pipe cleaner. The hole to the stem isn’t open like a normal pipe. The ramrod creates a slight obstruction at the tip. This makes the pipe cleaner get stuck at the bottom of the mouthpiece. In less rambling words, it’s hard to put a pipe cleaner through the entire mouthpiece. But it can be done. You put the pipe cleaner in until it stops. Then, carefully, you move about 1/8″ of an inch up the pipe cleaner and firmly push it in. You do this a couple of times, and eventually enough of the pipe cleaner sticks out of the bottom of the stem and you can just pull it through.

If you have nimble fingers, you can take the bowl off before you clean the stem. The bowl is just finger-tightened onto the stem. Putting a bowl on the stem proved challenging for the granddaughter of the man who started the company, but I was able to do it pretty easily. There are three holes you want to keep clear. One is on the valve, and assembled, sits in the stem, under the bowl. Then there’s the hole in the stem itself, and if you separate the bowl from the stem, there’s the hole in the bottom of the bowl.

As you might have figured out by now, cleaning a Kirsten pipe can be a little more complex than cleaning your average pipe. Still, if you’re not real picky, you can clean it quick. Pull out the valve and the mouthpiece, and run a tissue through it. Easy money. I just like taking all the parts off, and reassembling them. It makes me happy.

Oh, and this meerschaum bulldog bowl design does not like being lit with a lighter. This is a pipe that I can only light with matches. It won’t light easily any other way. Also, because I did end up buying about one of the most expensive of combinations of their pipes, they threw in a briar second for free.

cross sectionThe bowl designs are not your normal bowl shape. The interior of the Kirsten is conical. This conical design requires the bowls to be a non-standard shape. I’ve read of pipe-makers making regular bowls for the Kirsten, but it kind of defeats the purpose of owning the Kirsten. Anyway, because of this conical design, if you ever have to ream the thing out, you’ll need their custom reamer. Also, the bowls aren’t as deep because of this design, so they don’t smoke as long as my regular pipes.

All the hooha aside, here’s my key points. The pipe’s components can be mixed and matched. The stem works to cool the smoke and collect moisture normally caused by smoking moist tobacco. It’s kind of a pain in the ass to clean depending on how much effort you want to invest in it. The bowls interiors are conical and this makes the bowls shaped uniquely. The bulldog meerschaum looks like a toilet bowl, and requires matches to light. All that said, it’s still a cool, comfortable smoke and I like it.

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Windcaps / Windscreens

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

Windcaps, or windscreens as they’re sometimes known, are small cap-like devices for your pipe. They fit right over the bowl. They serve two primary purposes. If it’s windy, it keeps the embers from blowing out of your bowl and it slows down the airflow to the bowl, so your smoke doesn’t become very hot and burn fast.

windscreenThere’s four kinds of windscreens, but you’ll probably only want to know about two of them. The most common type of windcap looks like the image to the right. A round spring holds two clips to the interior of the pipe.

 WindcapThis is another type of windcap. To be honest, I’ve never actually seen one of these in person, but it looks pretty similar. I’d guess that there is a spring that holds the two buttons tight against the interior of the bowl. It would provide the same function as the windcap above.

 Butz-Choquin capped pipeButz-Choquin has a Rallye series of capped pipes. To be honest, I know nothing about this pipe other than it’s capped.

 Finally, some meerschaums come with decorative caps.  I don’t have a picture of one here, but the caps are usually attached to the pipe itself with a small chain.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, it rains enough to put out the tobacco in your pipe, so a regular pipe with a windcap like the first two I discussed here, is handy to keep the water out of your pipe if you smoke in the rain.

This is my windcap story: My wife and I walk the dogs along the beach at Dumas Bay in Washington state. Because it’s so breezy, I usually have to have a windcap or risk embers blown into my face. This is not a good thing. So I have one of those pipe windcaps with the round spring, like the first windcap described here. We go for a walk in January, and when I get home and fish my pipe and lighter out of my pocket, I realize I’ve lost the windcap.

Now, I’ll grant you I’m frugal. Okay, I’m tighter than paint on a wall, but I was upset I lost the windcap. It wasn’t much of a financial loss, about $3-$4, but still I don’t like losing things. With multiple head traumas in the past, I’m worried I’m going senile when I can’t find something. Digging through my pockets and tracking my steps through the driveway and house, I still couldn’t find it.

For the next week, every day I went for a walk on the beach, I’d look for it. It was ridiculous of course. The tides coming in and out would either bury or wash away anything that light. So I gave up on it, and went out and bought a new one.

 One day my wife walked the dogs on the beach without me. It was late March, two months after I had lost the windcap. She said, “Guess what I found?” No way, the windcap had washed back onto shore, and as she was walking along, she saw a glint in the sand. She walked over and saw the edge of the windcap and pulled it out.

It was rusty from the saltwater, but it was my windcap alright. I was so amazed, I put away my replacement windcap, and took a sander to take off as much of the rust as I could. I’ve become ridiculously fond of the miracle windcap that I won’t part with it willingly.

Of course, I could always lose it again.

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Tampers

Friday, March 21st, 2008

Today we’re going to talk about tampers. A tamper is a pipe tool used to compress the tobacco as you smoke it. You do this to keep the tobacco burning, and to keep it burning cool. Without tamping, the tobacco may become too loose to continue burning, or the tobacco aerates enough to start burning hot, which makes for a hot smoke, and your pipe may crack from the heat. If you don’t think it’s possible, I ended up cracking three or four pipes when I first started smoking, and that gets expensive fast.

A tamper can be something as simple as a nail. In my case, it’s sometimes my pointing finger, which makes me walk around with smudges on my face. Nothing says “adult” like a face smudged with ashes. Fortunately, most of the time I do use a tamper. I get tired of my wife pointing out that my nose has a black smudge on it.

Czech ToolA tamper can be a tamper alone, or it can be part of a set of pipe tools. Usually your first tamper will be the three tool Czech gizmo. It has a poker, a tamper, and a small spoon. This remains my most used tool, as I can use the poker to loosen the tobacco if I’ve packed it too tight, the tamper to tamp of course, and the spoon thing to move around the tobacco in the bowl, like closer to the draw hole if necessary. I’m not sure what that spoon thing is actually meant to do, but that’s what I use it for.

Tampers can also be a collectible classy instrument, like high end pens. There are tampers made from exotic woods, pewter, formed steel; pretty much anything that can be made with a blunt end to tamp down the tobacco. These runs from the double digits, to hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. I’ll add here that the Czech tool runs about $3 depending on where you get it. Back to the fancy tampers…

You can find tampers by just Googling them. My favorite tampers are from Catnip Hill Trading Company. The drawback is that they are pewter and soft, and can be broken if not handled carefully. I got the Calvinist pipe tamperCalvinist tamper as a humorous gift, and I ended up breaking the tamper. There’s no fixing it. Even if you melt the tamper pieces back together, it’s never as strong as the original. So these make good collectable tampers, unless you’re a careful person, or pick a thick tamper or short tamper unlikely to break. I told you I’m a klutz.

Again, I’ve been known to use anything at hand if I’ve misplaced my tamper, from my finger, bolts, the back end of pens, keys (they don’t work very well), multiple burnt matches, a thin lighter (not the smartest of things to do). I told you, I get desperate.

Sometimes I think I should make my own goofy tampers, out of wood or something metal. If you’ve made your own unusual tamper, I’d love to hear about them. It’d also be fun to hear about anything you’ve used as a tamper in desperation.

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Paragon Wax For Pipes

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

A quick review of Paragon Wax for the Pipe.  I chose this product because it has a higher melting point than carnuba, it’s harder than carnuba, and it can be polished without using a buffing wheel. Also, it can be used on meerschaum.

You get 1 ounce for $10, which looks like a very small amount, but you don’t really need that much to do the job. You apply just enough to create a filmy glaze on your pipe, let dry, then hand buff.

I used a microfiber cloth to polish the pipes. The wax itself is a grainy texture when you apply it, and not recommended for rusticated bowls. I also wouldn’t use it for detailed, ornate meerschaum. They have another product, Halycon II for those.

I do use Arango Briar Pipe Wipe, so my briar pipes aren’t real dingy to start with. The Paragon Wax did a nice job of shining them up. I’m no expert, but they looked like they had a much stronger polish than what the Pipe Wipe left. I did have one pipe that I was really interested in. The finish had chipped and cracked away as it’s a favorite frequently used pipe, and I am a klutz. There, I said it. Klutz. I’m frighteningly familiar with the sound of a pipe bouncing off the ground. Anyway, while it did do a great job polishing the pipe, alas, the scars of battle remained on the pipe, and the damage to the finish looked about the same.

That brings me to my meerschaums. I have two smokers, and one decorative. I don’t touch the decorative, don’t ask me to, it’s my big skull pipe you’ll find elsewhere in this blog. One of the smokers is a Kirsten bulldog and the other a simple egg meerschaum. The Kirsten is charred from my many attempts to light the dang thing with a lighter instead of a match. The egg meerschaum was the victim of the Internet.

Here’s the explanation about the Internet thing: When I had smoked the egg meerschaum for a while, it didn’t seem like the meerschaum coloration process was happening fast enough. I’m a very impatient person. So digging on the ‘net, I found a couple of methods for accelerating the coloration process. While I won’t go into what I tried, I will tell you that I ended up completely removing the meerschaum’s finish. The surface was not glossy at all. If you’re a meerschaum user, you know what the finish of a new meerschaum should feel like. I don’t give a good description here, but let it be said that I did completely screw up the finish.

I bought the Paragon for the express purpose of trying it on my meerschaums. I tried the egg meerschaum first, following the directions. Yes, I RTFM’d this time. Anyway, almost immediately, an awful stain spread across the bowl. I flipped out, and took extremely, extremely fine grit sandpaper to the stain. I figured I had already ruined the bowl, it didn’t really matter. Once the stain was gone, I tried it again, and a new stain appeared. Again, I took some sandpaper to it. I did it a third time, and the same thing happened. Disgusted, I set the pipe aside.

I decided to try the Kirsten as I think it’s made of pressed meerschaum dust instead of carved meerschaum, so the meerschaum wouldn’t color anyway. Again, figuring it was a lost cause, I tried sanding the rim a little to take away the scorch marks. I applied the wax just to the rim of the pipe, waited, polished, and was surprised to see that the finish looked new. What I hadn’t removed with the sandpaper was still there, but the finish still looked like it had just been applied. Wow!

I happened to glance over at the egg meerschaum, and the ugly stain had vanished. What the heck?! I rubbed off the glaze, amazed to see how shiny the meerschaum became. The stain was gone, and while it didn’t look new, the finish look great. I decided to try applying a second coat to see what happened.

I put the wax on, and again, the pipe developed ugly stains. Then I watched the pipe, and the stains faded within a few minutes. I shined it up again, and it looked even better! I don’t know if the stain appeared appeared because of the near complete lack of finish or what, but it seems I had panicked hastily. Even the areas where I had sanded looked great.

I’ve applied numerous coats to my meerschaum and the finish has improved each time. And I might be wrong, but the coloration process looks like it’s accelerated a little. Maybe in drying, the glaze pulled the nicotine outwards. I don’t know, but like I said, knowing the complete disaster I had started with, I’ve been amazed with the results.

So that’s my experience with Paragon Wax.

I’d post pictures of the pipe, but I don’t have a good “before” picture so it’d be kind of pointless. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

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