e Markle wrote: So for me, it's a lot of tinkering for a minimum benefit.
Ok, I'm going to chime in here...
I oil cure my pipes.
It says so right on the front page of my site, but other than that I don't publicize that fact too much. Many smokers swear by the added methodology, and just as many smokers just swear
at it. It's a controversial subject as I suspect, just like bowl coatings, there are enough makers doing a horrible job at it that it turns smokers off of the idea altogether.
I swear by it... well, my method at least. And I keep getting repeat buyers, many of whom I suspect never even noticed the short blurb about oil curing on my site, and have no idea that I do this.
The late wife of one of the late owners of my local Edward's used to work in the Edward's pipe factory here in Florida. Edward's pipes are notorious for being oil cured, and she was involved in that process. It didn't seem like they were keeping the process a secret, it just seemed like nobody ever asked.
I asked, and prompted many hours of conversations over many days and months about her work at the Edward's factory and the oil curing process.
Regarding Ernie's comment, these conversations saved me a lot of tinkering to get benefit, and a good amount of benefit at that. I suspect most folks who attempt oil curing never really see much benefit, and many of those I have spoke with have been doing an unnecessary amount of tinkering.
Now, I'm not going to go in to specific details about the oil recipe, temperatures, time and other factors, but traditional accounts of oil curing tinkering include mention of painfully long amounts of wait time, and lots of unnecessary filler steps.
For those die hard tinkerers who are not going to take no for an answer, I would like to help out a little by helping to steer the direction of your research in the right direction. Maybe I can save you a little time and trouble.
If you are already messing around with oil curing, here's an excerpt of information I shared not long ago as a result of an email inquiry on the subject:
My Email wrote:
The basic idea of oil curing, of course, is to leach the oil as deep as possible into the wood, allow it to mix with any remaining tannins and resins, then leach the mixture back out.
I'll assume the following about your process: That you have shaped and rough sanded the stummel as close as possible to your final shape before the curing process. That you are using new/clean oil for each pipe or batch of pipes. That you are also using heat when you steep the stummels.
Two weeks plus one month is a long time for a piece of briar to sit in the shop without being able to do anything with it. Here's a neat experiment you could try: Grab a few pieces of scrap briar, get them rough sanded just as you would a stummel before curing. Prepare a batch of oil, but add some blue or green (some obvious color) food coloring to the batch. Now start steeping those scraps in the oil! Pull one scrap out after 24 hours, wipe it dry, cut it open to reveal a cross section, and take your calipers and measure how far the dyed oil has penetrated into the briar. Pull the next scrap out after about three days and do the same. Give the next one maybe six days, about a week and a half for the next, and two weeks for the last. You will find a point where the oil has gone as far as it is going to go and done all the good that it's going to do. You might want to adjust the amount of time that the briar spend steeping.
As for pulling the oil back out of the briar... Well, that's just it. It might take a month for the oil to seep out on its own, but maybe you can reduce that time by "pulling" the oil out of the briar. The wood, naturally, wants to pull moisture inside. When you stick it in your oven, everything heats up and expands, and some of that oil gets pushed out and sits on top of the briar. As long as even a very thin layer of oil is sitting on top of the briar, the wood is in a battle between wanting to expel more oil via the heating process, and wanting to soak that extra oil back up via the natural capillary action of the wood. It creates a sort of oil traffic jam, until you wipe the excess off, then the oil will start to flow out again and you repeat the process. Well, I guess you could sit there and constantly wipe down the briar every minute of every hour of every day to keep it flowing... but that would just be silly. I think it would be better if the pipe were surrounded, or "wrapped" if you will, in something that will absorb the oil immediately as it reaches the surface of the briar, allowing the oil to flow constantly and in a sense "pulling" the oil from the wood and dramatically reducing the amount of time that this part of the process takes!
I do not in any way condone the use of this information as an excuse to start tinkering if you are not already!
All IMHO...