The pipe cleaner

A pipe cleaner is a type of brush originally intended for cleaning smoking pipe, and is useful for cleaning many other things besides pipes; including medical testing tubes, engineering and automotive equipment as well as being used to make objects just for fun. They also have many other uses around the house such as drip catchers on bottles, cable ties, paint brushes, colour coding items, oiling difficult to reach parts, cleaning furniture parts, and holding items in place.
A pipe cleaner is made of two lengths of wire, called the core, twisted together trapping short lengths of fibre between them, called the pile. Pipe cleaners are virtually always made two at a time, as the inner wires of each pipe cleaner have the yarn wrapped around them, making a coil, the outer wires trap the wraps of yarn, which are then cut, making the tufts. The pipe cleaner is then cut to length depending on the end use, usually 15 - 17cm (6 - 7 inches) for smoking cleaners and 15cm or 30cm (6 or 12 inches) for craft cleaners, although some pipe cleaners are made on bobbins of around 400m so they can be made into most lengths. There is a machine that has the yarn fed between the two wires and then the yarn is trapped by the wire, cut into tufts, and the wires are then twisted together. These machines can make striped pipe cleaners with a lot of different colours, or half one colour and half another. Some pipe cleaners are made this way with half bristle and half just cotton so the cleaner can be turned to use one end or the other.
Smoking pipe cleaners normally use some absorbent material, usually cotton or sometimes viscose. Bristles of stiffer material, normally monofilament nylon or polypropylene are added to better scrub out what is being cleaned. Microfilament plyester is used in some technical pipe cleaners and the polyester wicks the liquid away, as opposed to absorbing it like cotton. Unlike many other brushes, a pipe cleaner has no handle, making it useful for throwing away after being used, as one would not want to keep a pipe cleaner after it has cleaned out the dottle.
Some smoking pipe cleaners are made conical or tapered so that one end is thick and one end thin. These are useful to use the thin end for the small bore of the pipe stem and then the thick end for the bowl or the wider end of the stem.

Next articles: Pipe Tobacco Varieties