I was contacted several months ago by a dealer in African meerschaum who was looking for buyers & distributors. Normally African meerschaum has something of a low grade opinion in many pipe collecting circles, since it's often grey, unattractive, and not known to color. However, this company has a large-scale mining operation set up and rights to a sizable chunk of white African meerschaum. While I was not personally able to handle the sort of volume in sales they were seeking, I did end up receiving a large brick of the material to play with. I looked up all the info I could on making meerschaum pipes, and conferred with Ed Burak also, as he has a great deal of experience in the Vienna-school of meerschaum creation. In the end, I used a combination of methods to produce the pipe below and probably bungled a good bit of the process, but it was fun nonetheless. Ed Burak was right when he said, "Making a briar pipe has as much in common with making a meerschaum pipe as it does with making a pocketwatch"! I found that this African meer was very white, unlike my previous encounters with other African meer pipes, but it did contain some flaws and overall had a more porous, granite-like surface than the slices of raw Turkish meerschaum that I possess. I'm not sure if it's all like this or if I simply didn't cut it for best effect, but in any event I decided to find out what effect sandblasting might have on meerschaum and it turned out to be great fun - the mineral surface blasted away in a pattern that strongly resembles coral, leaving it looking something like a rusticated briar in surface texture. After blasting the surface, I put the pipe through the waxing treatment and it absorbed a huge amount of wax, turning a golden brownish color in the process. Unfortunately, I also discovered WHY no one blasts meerschaum at this point - normally one removes the pipe from the wax and polishes/wipes the wax residue away immediately, but this was impossible with this pipe as it was in the recesses and cooled instantly, transforming the pipe into a big golden gumball! This produced some sighs and resigned shrugs, and I went ahead and smoked it like this on the hope that a few hot bowls would solve the problem for me. This worked nicely, and the excess wax either evaporated or melted into the hot surface to leave me with a pristine blast texture again, though I can't imagine how this problem could be managed in production blasts. This is not a concern for me, however, as I have no intentions of making a line of meerschaum pipes anytime soon - just a few here and there for fun. It did turn out to be a strikingly good smoke, with an easier break-in than my IMP meers and an overall really enjoyable neutrality to it that my last African meer pipe lacked. Better still, I have a meer that I can take anywhere without worrying that the surface will be dented or scratched! I don't know what the coloring potential will be - normally the common opinion is that African meer doesn't color, but as this particular source is an exception to many of the opinions about African meer, perhaps I will see some color change.
Anyone interested in distributing or purchasing large-scale quantities of this meerschaum is welcome to contact me for more information. If you do, please be serious and be capable of handling 2,000 pounds of meerschaum or more per order - this is not a "buy just one or two blocks"-type of source. I've had nothing but terrific service with them so far, however, and the material seems to be ideal for use in volume production pipes.
I've now been smoking the pipe almost nightly for two months since finishing it, and it has begun to color in the shank. I wasn't expecting much coloring so this was a pleasant surprise. It isn't coloring as fast or as deep as my IMP Turkish meers but it's interesting and different, and this goes to prove that some African meerschaum does indeed color - I've been told for years that it didn't.
And by January 2005 it looked like this -
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