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Finishing
The single advantage that morta pipes have over briar in terms of
ease-of-creation is in finishing - the coloring is all in the wood and
the pipes cannot be stained. The black (or brown, or greenish-black) is
the natural color of the material. Also, morta is open-grained, meaning
that the rings are actually open to the air, resembling a series of
small dots on the surface rather than coloring in the wood. This can
cause hassles in buffing because the open rings want to pack with
buffing compound and the surface must be carefully polished with a fine
bristle wheel to remove any embedded gunk. The first step is still
sanding, however, and the pipe is normally sanded to 600 grit on the
surface. I use higher grits on the higher grade mortas, but it's not
entirely needed as the surface does not take a high gloss like briar
and going into the extreme levels of sandpaper grit is more wasted
effort than actual results. Below I am doing the basic sanding on one
of the first grade 3's:
The next step is buffing - first with brown compound which helps to
reveal any remaining surface scratches and then with white compound to
achieve a good gloss. Morta wants to maintain a satin finish - I have
waxed and polished pieces to an extreme level but they quickly dull
back down to a low sheen in use, and I've concluded that the material
is simply so open that a briar-like finish isn't possible.
The final stage in making a morta pipe is to stamp it. I still stamp by
hand without using jigs or braces, which is why my logos are often
somewhat skewed (much like my mind) - it's the authentic Talbert touch
that proves the pipe isn't a forgery :) Morta is a little easier to
stamp than briar because the surface doesn't scratch as easily from
fiddling the stamp around. There is one big problem with morta stamping
however, and that is legibility - the open graining of the wood makes
it sometimes challenging to clearly read the small stamping. It is
likely that sometime in the future I will have a new set of stamps made
specially for the morta pipes which will have larger and heavier
lettering for better results.
Once the stamping is done, the pipe receives a final wax and polish and a new morta pipe is ready for smoking!
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Talbert
Morta 
