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I'm thinking of purchasing this piece of briar but would like everyone opinion of what this pattern of grain is and will look like?
I got the two pieces briar below coming straight from Italy!
I am so excited to be able to work with these! Now if I just don't screw it up then they should make for two wonderful pipes! Looks like top notch briar to me? What do you think as far as grade if I don't run into anything bad inside?
331 and 329 are flame grain. Grading systems, however, are personal. If you are regularly paying for straight grain then you having a grade for it, if you are not then you have a grade for nice flame grain.
As for 332: Grain goes a certain direction. In the case of this piece it is angled slightly toward the side you are viewing. If you could see the back side of this block you'd be able to see the pattern of the grain and tell whether or not it would be a more acceptable grain pattern after you dug in a few cm's below the surface. That make sense?
As Ben mentioned, it's really, really tough to tell from a single picture of one side of a block of briar what kind of grain the finished pipe will have. From those pictures, I can't tell if the block was cut right, or just cut to accentuate the grain on one side of the block. In order to REALLY see what grain the block has in it, you need to pick it up and look at all sides, imagining the patterns throughout the block. Then, to get the grain on the pipe that you want, you need to pick a shape that takes full advantage of the grain you see in the block, and be prepared to make minor adjustments to the shape along the way.
I will say this, based on that one side that we can see, I'd certainly give them a second look if they were in a box at a pipe show.
If you grind the front sides and bottoms the answer to your question is there, the grain is leaning so when the straight grain is in the middle of becoming birdseye it usually looks like that but it could be the pattern you see and that whould make a pipe of extraordinary caracter.
