sandahlpipe wrote: 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.