What is a drying crack?

A drying crack, or drying cone as they’re sometimes known, is a naturally occurring separation in the layers of willow during the drying process of a cricket bat cleft. What looks like a crack is usually just the grain opening slightly as moisture leaves the timber. Not to be confused with a cricket bat cracking because it is dry.

The whole point of drying is to bring the cleft down to a workable weight so we can shape a bat with the right balance between durability and pickup. As the moisture content drops, natural stresses form in the wood and sometimes that shows itself at the very ends of the cleft.

Willow merchants have always been careful with their wording, often stating that the ends of the cleft are dipped in around 10mm of paraffin wax to minimise splitting. The key word there is minimise. It tells you that some level of movement during drying is expected.

Many experienced bat makers report seeing more drying cracks than they remember in years gone by. There’s no official data within the industry behind that, but it’s something spoken about more and more in workshops. One possible reason could be modern drying methods. A lot of willow merchants are now doing roughly six weeks of natural air drying followed by around six weeks in a kiln. Compared to the longer air drying periods that were more common years ago, that quicker turnaround could be a factor in why more splits are appearing, although every supplier works slightly differently.

In most cases, in my experience, it doesn’t affect the bat at all. They’re not pretty and can be a shock when you’re looking at a £400 bat expecting it to be flawless, but the vast majority are cosmetic only, and us bat makers have always tackled the problem with glue during the production process of we have manages to cut it out.

If a split is particularly open it can be glued and clamped back down. More often than not though, they’re very fine and a quality adhesive alone is enough to stabilise them. I can’t say that I’ve ever seen these develop into anything structural or performance related. You’ll usually find them at the toe, either on the actual toe, at the back near where the spine meets the toe, or sometimes on the thinnest part of a duckbill toe. The toe is thicker than the shoulder end near the handle, so with there being more material there you’re more likely to see a crack if one exists.

If the grain on the face allows, the natural splits on the cleft may even dictate which end you put the handle. If a crack is far enough away from the face, by the time the handle is spliced and the shoulder is cut, the split will often be removed anyway. They don’t tend to run very deep into the bat. They almost always appear at the extremities of the cleft rather than running all the way through the blade. Long blade bats can show them slightly more often simply because we’re keeping more of the original cleft length, whereas standard length bats tend to have the very ends removed during shaping.

Drying cracks don’t look great, and no one gets excited about seeing one, but they’re becoming more common and they’re something we have to understand rather than panic about. In nearly all cases they’re just a cosmetic feature of how natural timber behaves when it dries, not a sign that a bat is about to fail.