I have posted this elsewhere but since this looks like it will be a dedicated "How To" thread on cleaning up estates I think it's worth the repeat here. Due to the image restrictions I'm going to have to bust this up into several posts.
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I have seen a few threads on how to clean up an estate briar but only a few on cleaning up a meer. I have cleaned up two meers now and this post shows the steps I went through to clean up my second. Some of the information here was borrowed (see stole) from other sources online, and some of it I came up with myself after running into road blocks.
I'll start off by posting before and after pictures of the first meer I cleaned. It's a smooth billard with an acrylic stem and I really don't know whether it is block or pressed meerschaum, but after this second pipe I'm going to guess at pressed (more on that later).
Before:
After:
The second Meerschaum in question I picked up a few weeks ago in a local antique store for $20. This is what it looked like when I got it.
I am not sure if the stem on this pipe is bake lite or amber.
As you can see from the picture, the previous owner was not all that concerned about cake building up in his meer (very similar to the first). I brought out my senior style reamer and commenced (very carefully) to ream it out as much as I could. I have found you can only ream so much cake from a meer before other avenues are required. This is when I break out the sand paper (starting with 220 grit) and wrap it around the reamer. A loose fit works just fine as long as the sand paper will actually turn in the bowl.
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