Replies

1. 
   Woodsy | Jan 16, 2005 09:21pm | #1

   Hi Lewis.

   First saw the log end to end through the middle, then place the flat of one piece on the table and resaw it through its middle. repeat for the other half. You now have four quarters. You can take boards off each quarter, they get narrower as you continue to remove boards. This is one of the reasons quarter sawn timber is more expensive.

    

   Hope this helps

   Woodsy

2. 
   UncleDunc | Jan 17, 2005 12:46am | #2

   http://www.slcc.edu/tech/techsp/arch/courses/ARCH1210/Photos/sawn_log.jpg

1. 
   macalex | Jan 17, 2005 01:14am | #3

   Hey Unc, 10 out of 10. That's the shortest and most accurate response to a question I've seen here for ages! Should be pinned on the wall.

   MalcolmNew Zealand | New Thinking

1. 
   macalex | Jan 17, 2005 10:29pm | #4

   Actually, only a few of the boards (strictly speaking only the widest 4) will be true quarter sawn. In some species that makes a difference. With oak, the flashiest figure is shown on those boards, and with NZ native kauri the characteristic very fine (bee's wing) fleck begins to disappear within a few degrees of true QS. 

   Many timbers have quite different plain sawn and quarter sawn appearances. Elm QS faces can be spectacular.

   MalcolmNew Zealand | New Thinking

1. 
   UncleDunc | Jan 17, 2005 10:41pm | #5

   Or you can do like the clapboard mill that advertises in Fine Homebuilding and rotate your log after each cut, so that every cut is on a true radial plane.

1. 
   macalex | Jan 18, 2005 01:42am | #7

   Yes. One of the reasons why traditional sawyers didn't like quarter sawing is because it's hard to do without wasting quite a lot of the log. And its fiddly.

   As an aside, I made a couple of kitchen cutting boards from QS totara as a Xmas project, and wish I'd cut more of the log into QS boards. The timber came from a giant log (about 1.5m in diameter, something like 10 metres long) that was gifted to me by the farmer who had dragged it out of the river as a boy, before the war. He was going to blast it apart to make fence posts and never got around to it. Heard I was setting up a shop nearby and asked if I'd like the log. What log? It was almost invisible in the long grass and all the sap had long since rotted off. A chain miller and I leveraged it up onto sleepers and sliced it up with a long bar twin engine chain mill. The timber came from the saw as beef-red boards, so slow grown that the grain is almost invisible. My QS cutting bords span almost 100 years of growth lines! Locally it was called 'mountain totara', because it was washed down from high terraces near the top of the bush line, hence the slow growth. Heaven knows how old this log was. Totara can be many hundreds, perhaps over 1,000 years old.

   We could have rotated the log and cut more QS. It would have taken longer and been wasteful, but the 2 or 3 QS boards are special.

   M

   New Zealand | New Thinking

   Edited 1/17/2005 5:44 pm ET by kiwimac

2. 
   sharpblade | Jan 18, 2005 02:00am | #8

   I remember a while back while leafing through a mail-order catalog, selling various cutlery , medieval arms and wannabe detective or soldier of fortune stuff. For one of the items, the description starts by extoling the virtues of QS wood, how it is more valuable, more beautiful, stronger etcetcetc... which implies the item for sale is of high quality.  Item is a spear and the wood component is the turned shaft. QS yeah, right, as if it mattered.

3. 
   macalex | Jan 18, 2005 04:33am | #9

   and for a turned object, whether the original board was QS or not is irrelevant!New Zealand | New Thinking

3. 
   forestgirl | Jan 18, 2005 12:39am | #6

   Keep in mind that even with the old Mission furniture, the wood wasn't necessarily perfectly quartersawn.  Sometimes, the ray flecks of the oak are too big and showy.  Wood can be rift-sawn, slightly off true quartersawn, to provide interesting figure without producing overly large rays.  According to Hoadly in Understanding Wood, this is how lacewood generally is cut.

   forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
   Another proud member of the  "I Rocked With ToolDoc Club" .... :>)