Waxing is where I started to get into unknown territory and may have mucked it all up. I have watched people melt bees wax, cork bowls, and place some type of stopper in the shank, then put the pipe in there and just stir it around. I wasn't going to do all that.

I saw a youtube of a guy that melted beeswax on a paper towel, smoked his pipe, held the pipe in the towel, and just rubbed it now and then. I did this with the smooth billard and it worked great, giving it a nice shine. On this pipe, the results were quite different.

First, instead of a paper towel I used a micro fibre cloth purchased at Harbor Freight.



I packed my pipe with some Three Nuns and fired her up.





I was amazed at how much wax this pipe sucked up and how it immediately started to color. This is what I think a lot of people refer to as false coloring a meer. I'm really not sure whether it would have been better to not use wax at all but here is what the pipe looked like after just one smoke.