Is it OK to Never Remove the Stem ?

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This is what has always bothered me about the whole water in pipes thing.
Before I ever heard about rinsing my pipes in water, I was at one of my first pipe club meetings. A very large raucous Mississippi guy dressed like Crocodile Dundee was telling this fly fishing story. He was smoking his pipe, tossing his fly, and splash, he dropped his pipe in the water, "Man on Man, I was heart broken. It was my best pipe." End of story. Everyone was laughing and backslapping the guy.
I was like the only one who didn't get it. "So, what happened to the pipe?"
"I dropped it in the water," he said with this really large smile, but his eyes were saying that I was stupid.
I was definitely feeling stupid. "Was the pipe destroyed by the water?"
"Of course you idiot, everyone knows that you can't get your pipe wet."
I had never heard this, and I grew up with pipesmokers all around me. "Did the pipe sink or did you lose it?"
"No, I was right there, scooped it up."
"So, what did the water do to the pipe that destroyed it? Did it swell up and crack?"
"Uuuuuuuhhhhh, yeah..."
"Do you have the pipe here?"
"No, it's in Mississippi."
"Can you bring it to the next meeting? I would love to see this water damage."
"Absolutely, Cosmic. Just keep your pipes dry."

He never brought the pipe, and I hounded him each meeting. I still hound him, even after demonstrating the rinsing technique to the club a few years later. Even after he started rinsing his pipes, I would ask, "are your pipes getting destroyed by water now?"

I have not even the foggiest notion of what negatives could happen to a briar pipe if gotten wet. The acrid acidic condensation that forms inside the pipe while smoking it, is way more likely to cause problems, but that is not from the H2O, but from the acidity. Heat and extreme cold might be a worry, but not really. I leave pipes in my truck in the summer all the time, the ALABAMA summer. Maybe the cold, but I have also put pipes in the freezer to get bands off of pipes from time to time. Briar is a pretty tough thing.

It takes a perfect set of things to come together to hurt it with water. A perfect storm, so to say. If you have a huge amount of cake, you probably want to avoid getting it wet. But, a close trimmed cake, no worries.
Acidic water, probably don't soak it in that.
Soaps now a day is not so aggressive. You can actually use soaps on cast iron. But, when the idea to never use soap on cast iron came out, they had lye in them. Maybe water just sucked back in the turn of the century, and that is where the myth about water in pipes started. Same as people who use cast iron nowadays and never wash them, like homeless people, eating out of nasty food encrusted cookware. Ugg.

Anyways... it's silly. Do whatever you want to your pipes. Leave my routine alone.
 

captainFrank

Lurker
Apr 6, 2024
15
15
First MacQueen is a pipemaker that works in woods other than briar.
Many items made of wood spend their entire life in water. I have a wood canoe. Many woods are naturally water proof, many are not. Briar just happens to be. Cedar is also.
Did you miss the part about Ashdigger trying his danmdest to get briar to absorb water? He was not a wood rincer and convinced himself that he was wrong with his experiment.

I hate to break this to you, but using excuses why men buy extra pipes is not very scientific. Ha ha.

How do you explain thousands of men using water in their pipes with no negative consequences? Are we all just more blessed by God than You?

I'm afraid you poorly contrived arguments are not winning me over. You'll have to do way better than that to convince someone who drenches his pipes in water, sometimes soaking them, that what he is doing is wrong, especially after years and years of doing it.

It's actually sort of idiotic to try. And, no, I did not call you an idiot. I merely said your endeavor is.
You've actuially just been on this forum for 12 posts, and just after hitting a dozen you want to come at me with these half wit links ( I said the links were halfwit) to support your poorly contrived argument. Why not go and worry about what other people are doing in their bedrooms, or what religions other people practice, or go about telling people what they should think or do, and leave the water rincers alone. Ha ha.

What exactly, from reading my post, made you think that I tried to convince you or win you over ? Everything I posted referred to what **I**, and **I** ALONE planed to do, and haven't advised anybody, nor even suggested on what others should do. It is in my own right not to trust your word, or anybody else you would point to, as trust is earned, not given. I've spoken in my own name, never in someone's else name (as in "we").

What makes you think that I even **CARE** what you do ? I don't.

I have no obligation whatsoever to explain anything to you or anybody else. What makes you think that you are SO important anyway ?

The end of your rant is so low level ... it doesn't deserve a reply. If you want to degrade yourself to that level, that's your choice. But I won't.

And this is where my interaction with you comes to an end. You won't get any more replies from me regardless of what you're going to say.
 
I have no obligation whatsoever to explain anything to you or anybody else. What makes you think that you are SO important anyway ?
Then why did you try? What was even your point?
I never said that I was important. What makes you think that I think that I am important?
And this is where my interaction with you comes to an end. You won't get any more replies from me regardless of what you're going to say.

Good, then you get the last word, without supporting why you think that I think that I am important. puffy

What you actually did was...
You told me to stick with the facts, and then you gave me some links to poor examples that did not even come close to countering first hand experience for years.

This is a forum, welcome to the internet. I am just having fun. Mostly, I try to help folks. Sometimes, when challenged, it becomes a debate. Debate is a logic game. In this instance, there are those of us who have been washing pipes with water for years, with nothing negative happening. And, this seems to twist some people's minds. It is like seeing someone fly in a big metal airplane, and then some people are on the ground pointing at it, saying, "big heavy things made of metal cannot fly." Then they come up with some links to things about gravity and the weights of metal. Then, where the logic comes in, is explaining why aerodynamics and lift counters what one knows about gravity. But, all in all in a debate, the two are not really trying to convince each other. We merely explain why the other's ideas are wrong to the readers. The readers are the judges. I have no hard feelings at all towards you. this was all about ideas and concepts. Heck, I won't even remember this in the morning, because a million more important things will happen between now and then. But, this is here for the enjoyment of the masses. And, as it probably was to you, I also found it fun.

I hope you don't walk away sour. I don't know you, but I did enjoy conversing with you. Probably in a few days, we will be laughing at something else, or both of us talking about some awesome tobacco... or arguing over some weird pipe, ha ha.

Thank you, and I hope to see you in other threads soon.
 
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