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Though smooth pipes are extremely popular, and generally command the highest prices, there are quite a few pipemen who prefer other finishes, sometimes because of the less expensive price tag, but also often because of the more stimulating textures. One of the tasks most new employees are saddled with when fresh to our office is sorting through invoices from various pipemakers or manufacturers to make sure we received what we ordered. Often this leads to the new employee scratching his or her head while wondering what the difference is between a sandblast and a rusticated piece. It just so happens that there are two boxes of briar under my desk (which I keep forgetting to take home to add to my stock) which have become very useful visual aids to show Smokingpipes.com employees what pipes are made from and how to recognize the details of briar's texture, and how they are expressed in different finishes.
The potential for a great smooth pipe is often easy to spot in a block, but it's still fun to wipe down a beautifully cut piece of briar just to show off the grain. I confess to likely deriving considerably more delight from this exercise than my coworkers, because I see potential for different shapes within each block. Some of these examples have growth rings that are very easy to see with the naked eye, so I’m able to draw a few shapes on the side of the block and explain how a pipe is cut in such a way to produce a ring grain pattern (which could also potentially be a straight grain if given a smooth finish, though unlike a sandblast, pits must be taken into consideration with the latter). Further, I’ll explain that pipes that have very bizarre grain patterns with no discernible growth ring pattern wouldn't make a nice smooth, nor would it make a nice sandblast. A sandblast, you see, is the skeleton of a pipe. Sure, some companies out there fake a ring-grained blast by carving the bowl with a tool and then lightly blasting over the top of it, which simply creates a desired effect that people like. For the most part, though, a pipe that is not pretty enough to be smooth or blasted will have the surface rusticated by various tools that leave it evenly craggy, taking the place of the briar's natural pattern.
The best sandblasted pipes will show the growth rings as wavy lines going around the bowl in some pattern, with varying degrees of consistency, depth, and density from pipe to pipe. One of the best ways to think about this is imagining that the pipe you are holding is smooth before finishing. Imagine that you have a pot of melted wax, and dip most of the pipe in this wax, and then dip it into cool water to solidify the coating. Imagine that each time you dip the pipe into wax, you stop just short of the previous dip; what you would end up with is rippled lines working their way around the bowl. Each layer leaves a little line that looks like growth rings. If a pipe has any sort of little lines running around the bowl, it's sandblasted. Further, I might add, is that there is a misconception that all sandblasted pipes are flawed pipes. Not true. There are a great number of pipemakers - myself included - that pick up a block and see such stunning growth rings and understand a that this block, as a sandblasted pipe, would be far more beautiful than as a smooth one. Some blocks of briar, cutters and makers say, are just 'begging' to be sandblasted. The texture is quite lovely and a great many of us might even prefer to see some interesting growth patterns of the wood over an even, smooth-polished surface.
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