Try This at Home: a Collector's Notes on Amateur Repair

"Try this at Home" is an article credited, according to its byline, to collector Rich Esserman, published in The Pipe Collector, the newsletter of the North American Society of Pipe Collectors, and later reprinted with permission on Pipedia. Its subject is tidying up secondhand pipes with everyday household materials instead of sending them to a workshop.

The piece's standing in the community comes less from the specific steps it lists than from the attitude it argues for: the author openly admits he has no particular gift for handiwork, and builds his whole approach on that admission.

The Restorer's Bench, the Collector's Table

The fast tools of professional restoration — buffing wheels, sandpaper, heat guns — deliver quick results in an experienced hand and irreversible damage in an inexperienced one. The article's proposed way out is to trade tool speed for slowness: soft abrasives, solvents, and repetition instead of powered machinery. For a restorer this is inefficient, since it takes many times longer to finish the same job. For the amateur, though, it lowers the risk of ruin and leaves the thing that actually matters — the pipe's original character — untouched.