Oil Curing

[sagiter]

not meaning to step on Trevers toes....

Trever took over (bought) the pipe making studio in Herbingac from Patrice Stabille (sp). Studion might be the wrong word based on some descriptions. Anyway my understanding is that the operation was bought lock, stock and barrel. Many of the barrel contained pre turned stummels.
He uses them for his LB line.

Neil

[Nick]

Patrice Sebilo was the guys name

[TreverT]

A cob sounds ideal for testing. Neutral flavor and cheap.

But Trever...can you help me with something....20,000 stummels to experiment on!!!! How did you get that? Did you, and 20 of your friends, perform a midnight raid on the BC factory??? Where do you put them all?

Not to harshly douse your enthusiasm, but I can't imagine a cob being useful for oil testing at all - it's a totally different material, more absorbent, different flavor different behavior, etc. It's bad enough just having to deal with minute variations among briar, much less base anything on results with a whole different material. Getting things reliable takes a lot of work and experimentation. At the moment, for instance, I have four test pipes that I'm smoking back-to-back each night - with differences between them as small as one having an extra day's boiling and one not, one slow-drying and one fast-drying afterards, etc (and there are discernible differences in the smoke...it's bloody handy to have identical stummels to compare back-to-back). This is, odd as it may sound, all part of my work on devising a style of briar treatment for my chambers that might make pre-carbonizing unnecessary (hardening the walls against fire, helping to neutralize the acidic flavor in early smokes, etc).

As for the stummels, Neil has already answered that. When I bought this workshop & house, I was the third pipemaker to work here. Between being inhabited by pipemakers for the past 50 years or more (the building was a pub before that, from 1911 through the late 40's... which is an entertaining thought, and not a little romantic, to wonder if my den was host to secret late-night meetings of the French Resistance!), a lot of stuff accumulated here. Plus, Patrice bought a great deal of tools and materials in St. Claude. I've got about 20K of pre-turned, roughed stummels, maybe 40-50,000 molded stems, several buckets of pre-cast brass and nickel bands, and a lot of other misc stuff (a grocry sack of metal filter widgits, for instance, which I plan to make a gag gift out of eventually). It's ideal for testing ideas since I can easily lay hands on identical stummels and stems, and make a working (if not pretty) pipe for my idea in 20 minutes. When you add in stuff like the custom-made briar dryer it's a pretty neat setup, though there was and still remains a great deal to do to really optimize the shop to my own style of working. It was pretty much set up to produce high-speed cheapie pipes, and it's been challenging to work my own tools and methods into the mix (and floor space). As for where I keep them, we have a stone barn that is filled floor-to-ceiling down one wall with crates of stummels and half-full of sacks of old Algerian briar. Plus the workshop is crammed, and I still haven't even gone into the third attic (the second attic is enough of a madhouse of ancient stuff, including a huge blackened scythe). Unfortunately my redesigning of the workshop has been hell to get going thanks to the more-urgent remodeling needed for the house proper.

Hmm, it occurs to me that I should probably make a point to mention that I don't sell parts and pieces, despite the size of this pile of stuff, except only privately and in large quantities - I just don't have the time to bother with sending 5 stems here and 6 blocks of briar there. Maybe someday once the house and shop are finished and we have a fat stock of inventory work on hand, but not until!

[Nick]

D'OOHH!!!

I'm sure everyone had their email apps open and was typing in your addy until that last paragraph.

Hehehee.

Hope the remodeling is going well.

[Brendhain]

WARNING WARNING WARNING------A JOKE IS COMING

Trever,

Now you are just bragging!


this has been a joke. this joke does not necessarily relect the opinions of Tyler Lane Pipe Forum. Nor does it necessarily relfect the opinion of the forum's user or the author of the joke. This joke is only meant for mature audience and should not be shown to minors.

This has only been a joke. Had it been a serious remark you would have been instructed towards the proper authorities. This is only a joke.

[ToddJohnson]

WARNING WARNING WARNING------A JOKE IS COMING

Trever,

Now you are just bragging!


this has been a joke. this joke does not necessarily relect the opinions of Tyler Lane Pipe Forum. Nor does it necessarily relfect the opinion of the forum's user or the author of the joke. This joke is only meant for mature audience and should not be shown to minors.

This has only been a joke. Had it been a serious remark you would have been instructed towards the proper authorities. This is only a joke.

That's it BrendHain, I'm leaving!

Todd

[BobH]

Last night I did a small experiment with a few pipe bowls and pieces of wood I had did an oil treatment on.

I used a small microwave oven in my shop to heat them and wiped off any oil that came to the surface. At first I tested a small chunk of cherry wood, running the microwave on high for 5 or 10 seconds at a time checking the wood to see how hot it was getting. Soon oil formed at the end grain and I continued to heat it intermittently on defrost for several minutes. I could see a small amount of smoke beginning to come from the wood and stopped at that point. Every few heating cycles I took it out to wipe off any excess oil and it looks like it did no harm to the block. On cooling it was visibly drier and took on a very high gloss when polished.

I did the same to every oil cured piece in my shop with good results. Some released much more than expected and others very little. I watched closely so the wood did not scorch. That little microwave could turn a stummel into cinders.

[alexanderfrese]

Just to throw in one or two Euro-Cents of experience about the linseed oil mentioned sonewhere above:

I do use this in finishing process. As far as I know, linseed oil starts a chemical alteration if it has contact with air (probably some sort of oxidation). There is some influence coming from light, too. I read somewhere it hardens and dries out slower if left in the dark.
Pure linseed oil takes a lonf time to harden, and as I can see from the rim of the can I take it from never gets really hard. All the linseed firnis oils do have some drying agents within them to speed up that process. These agents used to contain some lead (at least in kind of molecules) and were considered a risk to the health if used oin woods that were used e.g. in a kitchen.
Nowadays these drying agents are lead free, but I think here in Germany linseed firnisses are still forbidden in food processing environments.
Still I strongly believe linseed oil is perfectly unsuitabel for any curing process, though I have some good experience within finishing.

Just for the records: I tried oil curing in a rather rough way a on an estate stummel by boling this in oil. I reduced temp to a rather low point, when there were no more bubbles coming up, making it look less like a french fry in it’s oil. I watched it for several hours every 15 or twenty minutes. Nothing seemed to go wrong for two or three hours. Taking out the stummel, wiping it off, it looked like a stummel soaked with oil.
Then – suddenly within another 15 or twenty minutes – it had turned dark and had two cracks. 8O

Surely was not a controlled environment, maybe the temperature had gone higher (I don't have a thermometer for those temperatures), I don't know. Just to warn you from some form of no-go experiment.

Alex

[Brendhain]

You don't need to deep fry the block to get oil into it. Just bake it in an over at a low temperate (circa 100 C or 200 F) for an hour or two. Then, drop the hot block into the oil. The block will suck up tons of the oil and you should have any problem with cracking.

If you are going to use linseed oil for oil curing and you want pure oil (i.e. no additives) then get "cold pressed" or "extra virgin" linseed oil. You want to get "the good stuff", not some cheap stuff from Walmart. Don't get boiled inseed oil because they, generally, have chemicals added.

[alexanderfrese]

Right ’bout the "vergin" quality for linseed oil. But at the risk of repeating myself: To my knowledge, linseed oil hardens even without added drying agents. So it should not be the oil of choice for a curing process.

[Brendhain]

Linseed oil, and nearly all plant oils, do "harden". This is another term, in the wood working industry, for "drying". Virgin linseed oil applied to wood will take about 2 years to dry on its own with good ventilation. There will be a residue left behind inside the wood. This residue is edible (as is linseed oil) if one wished to eat it. During the winter I put crushed linseeds into my oatmeal, very nutritious!!

The trick with oilcuring briar is to get the vast majority of the oil out of the wood once it has been in it. The idea is to not leave much oil at all inside the wood. This way there will be very little residue once the oil has dried. If one does leave too much oil in the wood then this oil will be pushed out of the wood when the pipe is smoked and form drops on the surface (much in the same way that an over waxed meerschaum will do). This oil, if left alone, will be re-absorbed back into the wood. If enough time has gone by (circa 2 years) then the oil would be completely dried and should not bubble to the surface.

The amount of residue is minimal. After proper expulsion of the oil from the wood there could be a maximum of a centiliter of the oil left in the briar (1/250th of a cup). The amount is probably much less than that since the block will actually weigh less after it has been oilcured. The oil displaces the moisture that was inside the wood. Oil being lighter than water makes the block now weigh less.

Considering that over 97% of good quality, cold pressed linseed oil is made up of oil then that would leave 3% of a centiliter of nontoxic residual plant material left inside the wood.......There is more carnuba wax put onto the pipe than the residue from oilcuring with linseed oil. I would rather eat a centiliter or linseed oil (very good for your skin and hair- it is commonly fed to horses and put into dog food) then the same amount of carnuba wax but, maybe, that is just my tastes.

FYI: Ashton uses linseed oil in his oil curing. His patent application reads exactly that, as does Dunhill's and Sasieni's.

[StephenDownie]

I've done some experiments with oil curing pipes and smoke two of them regularily. By no means is this an end method for oil curing, but it's made some decent tasting pipes. I see this as a work in progress. If you can get anything out of it great, if it doesn't work for you sorry, but I said it was a work in progress . I haven't sold any as the process is pretty time consuming, and the experiments I did were on pipes that for one reason or another were not good enough to be sold.

For the oil I've found that a 1 to 1 mixture of Olive Oil and Grapeseed oil makes for a nice tasting pipe. Twice a day for 2 hours at a time over two weeks I heated the pipe in an oven dish filled with the oil to 200 f and let them completely cool. If you must know I pre-heated the oven. After the two weeks was up the oil was darker and cloudy at the bottom. For the next two weeks I continued to do the same, but drained the oil and stuffed rags into the tobacco chamber to wick the oil out and wiped the excess oil off after every heating. I replaced the rags often as well. The process did darken the pipes quite a bit, but the flavor was very nice.

Again I warn this isn't the end word in oil curing, it's a work in progress. Do what you'd like with it, but don't blame me iof it doesn't work.

Best Wishes,
Stephen

[ArtGuy]

You don't need to deep fry the block to get oil into it. Just bake it in an over at a low temperate (circa 100 C or 200 F) for an hour or two. Then, drop the hot block into the oil. The block will suck up tons of the oil and you should have any problem with cracking.

If you are going to use linseed oil for oil curing and you want pure oil (i.e. no additives) then get "cold pressed" or "extra virgin" linseed oil. You want to get "the good stuff", not some cheap stuff from Walmart. Don't get boiled inseed oil because they, generally, have chemicals added.

Art Supply stores are a good place to get cold pressed linseed oil. However, it would be much more expensive than the olive oil