Some eBay-Fu to make life easier.

[Houtenziel]

It's sort of interesting that a couple months after posting these, all the good vintage pipes have dried up.

[Longshanks]

Knowing what I know now, I've almost been afraid to bid on anything. I feel like I'm looking at the exact same pipes everyone else in PSF-land is...

[Ruffinogold]

I was just reading up on how eBay's search engine works and discovered that they have some logic you can use to tighten up your searches. A lot of this is available in the "advanced search" function, but I find that just saving the search strings to a text file on my computer makes checks easier/quicker.. you'll see why in a second.

First off, say you are searching for some vintage Dr. Grabow pipes, you could just type "Dr Grabow Vintage", "Dr Grabow Estate", or even just "Dr Grabow" and sift throught the crazy number of listings to find that special pipe. There is definitely merit to that, and sometimes I like to just peruse through that way.

But say I wanted to get more specific, say I only wanted to look for a certain subset of Dr. Grabow's line. We'll say I only want to show Dr. Grabow listings that are models Viscount, Westbrook, or Starfire. You can bracket your searches to narrow things down, so your search would look something like:

dr grabow (viscount, westbrook, starfire)

And you will only get listings from those lines.

This breaks down to basically saying give me all the listings that have "dr grabow", but only show those that include the words in the parentheses also.

Maybe you like Kaywoodies instead, but only want to see Flame Grain, Standard, and Red Root.

kaywoodie (flame grain, standard, red root)

Or maybe you just know you don't want a smooth Kaywoodie

kaywoodie (rusticated, rustic, sandblasted, blasted, fine line, coral)

Say you want to do a broad search, using some of the brands you discovered in a vintage American pipes thread.. well we can do something like this to narrow down the listings:

pipe estate (dr grabow, kaywoodie, medico, yello bole, weber, wdc, custombilt, heritage, willard, van roy, wally frank, LHS)

Bam, you have your own curated listings of just those brands to look through.

You can even get tricky if you don't know model names, but you know that the Dr Grabow models you want have a stinger or threaded tenon. Simply run the following search string:

dr grabow (adjustomatic, threaded tenon, screw tenon, screw stem, screw in stem, stinger, condenser)

Then to make sure you get those listings where the seller only mentions the stinger/tenon in the description, click "Advanced Search", then click "Title and Description" under Search Including.

You can also exclude things from as search. Say you like Kaywoodie Flame grains, but you hate the meerschaum lined ones, you can just precede "meerschaum" with a minus and that will tell ebay's search engine you don't want to see it.

kaywoodie flame grain -meerschaum

Once you get things dialed in, you can save your search string to a text file, or simply bookmark the ebay search results page directly after you run the search. Then if you want to check the bay for stuff you can just run your predefined search. eBay also accepts boolean operators like AND, OR, NOT, but I am not going to get into that now.. if you are feeling nerdy and want to search that out on your own, go for it.

What , you didn't know that ?! Arent you a millennial ?

I knew that like 22 years ago








actually , thats not true / I had no idea

[Houtenziel]

Arent you a millennial ?

Never have I been more insulted.. lol I guess by birth I am.. but really I am a conservative crotchety old curmudgeon who hates 99% of people my own age or younger.

[Kevin Keith]

Arent you a millennial ?

Never have I been more insulted.. lol I guess by birth I am.. but really I am a conservative crotchety old curmudgeon who hates 99% of people my own age or younger.

The Mayor is Gen X, just so ya know. lol

[Ruffinogold]

Arent you a millennial ?

Never have I been more insulted.. lol I guess by birth I am.. but really I am a conservative crotchety old curmudgeon who hates 99% of people my own age or younger.

The Mayor is Gen X, just so ya know. lol

Yeah. The first year of genX . Better that than being REALLY old

Look man , Dylan went electric cause I was coming