>>1363196>Estate pipes are great and all but i get skeeved out thinking of someone else slobbering all over the stem and having it seep down into the shank.That’s all in your head.
Most of the cooties die off just by drying out, and the rest are either washed away thanks to their habitat being dissolved or murdered outright by the alcohol.
You’re actually pretty safe.
The bigger challenge is getting the fuckers all the way clean. Two things that helped me immensely were bristled pipe cleaners and a shank brush. Those do lots of the heavy lifting when it comes to cleaning out heavily soiled pipes.
Just put some alcohol in a small bowl, wet your shank brush and go to town. Every so often clean off your brush in the alcohol and keep going. When it comes out mostly clean, switch back to plain pipe cleaners and clean out the rest of the residues that way.
For the very worst, most plugged stems, you may have to resort to more radical methods to clean your airway. If it went even pass a pipe cleaner, you may have to resort to a drill bit. Take the very tiniest drill bit you can find, place it on the tar deposit and spin it between your fingers until either the mouthpiece is unblocked or you can’t go any deeper without either losing the drill bit or damaging the pipe.
