wet blocks?

[Josh B.]

i have a big box of briar that was sitting in my workshop and two days ago we had a pretty bad storm and my roof sprung a leak right under the box and got every single piece nice and soaked. i pulled them all out and laid them on a towel inside and left them to dry out. how long should i wait to start working on these without any worry of making a pipe and having it split or crack because of the water. and should i be doing anything different in the drying process.

[Ocelot55]

I know very little of the subject. So many variables to account for, but I just bought a batch of briar from Mimmo who told me that the briar was very wet and couldn't be used immediately. Now I store my briar in my very sophisticated drying environment of my Jeep's back seat. (One of the side effects of not having a shop. In the relative humidity of the West Texas Panhandle, baking in the sun, it has dried significantly in one month. I probably won't cut into it for another month or so.

One thing is for sure, you want to make sure that your briar is as dry as possible. It really does work much differently when wet. If it were me, I wouldn't touch it for a while.

Long response to say nothing....

[caskwith]

Briar doesn't soak up water to easily, even blocked submerged for hours will still only be wet on the outside. Lay the blocks out, preferably on something like wire racks but anything that will let the air circulate will do, leave them for a week or two in a dry place and they will be fine.

[baweaverpipes]

Briar doesn't soak up water to easily, even blocked submerged for hours will still only be wet on the outside. Lay the blocks out, preferably on something like wire racks but anything that will let the air circulate will do, leave them for a week or two in a dry place and they will be fine.

Chris is correct.
One thing I do is either put them in the blast cabinet or a large bag of rice. I bought a huge bag of rice at Costco, just to put briar that seemed wet. If you get your IPhone wet, Apple suggests you place it in a bag of rice. That's where I got the idea!

[sandahlpipe]

Sixten Ivarsson just let his blocks sit out in his workshop. If it's going to crack, it will crack. Better at your workshop than in the customer's hands. Water from rain isn't going to hurt the briar. In fact, I will often soak the block in water to see the grain before I start using a block. And if it's not what I'm looking for, it goes back onto the shelf wet. As has been said, wet on the outside doesn't matter as long as the block is dry on the inside when you start working it.

[Sasquatch]

If it's going to crack, it will crack. Better at your workshop than in the customer's hands.

This is dead wrong and somewhat misleading. I've never had a pipe crack in a customer's hands, and it never crosses my mind. "I hope it doesn't crack." shouldn't have to be part of your thought process in selling briar pipes.

Briar (and any wood) will crack only when certain physical conditions are met. Wet wood is slightly larger than dry wood because the xylem are full of water and pudged up a bit. If the outside xylem dry out and shrink, they cannot stay in contact with each other because the wood on the inside of the block is still pudgy. This we see as a crack. If the interior wood also dries out and gets smaller, you'll see no cracking at all because the exterior is not getting relatively too small to "contain" the interior, so to speak. The whole block just shrinks.

You'll see the effects of this process on blocks that were cut on a straight saw, and by the time you get them, they are twisted or warped slightly because of all this natural movement.

I keep my blocks in my shop too, but only after I've slowely dried them. The humidity here is like, 3% in the winter, and if I get fresh blocks, they'll literally crack overnight as the moisture pours out of the outside layer.

This is entirely preventable, and to suggest that the pipes themselves are equally prone to that cracking is wrong for two reasons. One, dried under control, there is no cracking. Two, if you cut a pipe even from totally soaking wet wood, it won't crack because it can flex as it dries, there's no area that isn't drying quickly so there's no differential in dryness on the finished stummel. In fact, it will warp quite significantly in drying, and things like the mortise size and possibly the fit on the end of the shank will change.

The wood I just brought back from Chicago is wet. It's wet enough that 10 blocks in a garbage bag for two weeks has left the inside of the garbage bag wet to the touch. I can't leave these blocks out in my shop and I wouldn't even at this point try the rice approach. I'll let them sit awhile, slowly bleed that bag of moisture with a few holes, then transfer them to a paper bag or a cardboard box, sealed away from air yet but now with a permeable membrane.

This takes a year or two for me. I could probably do it over 6 months, but there's no need.