Ideal growth ring direction
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- This topic has 6 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 4 years, 11 months ago by David.
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Hello everyone,
I am planning on my first larger project which will be a bedside cabinet (with a slightly different style than the project here on WMC). Therefore I have bought a rough sawn board (beech) in the profile dimensions of 270mm × 65mm (10⅔” × 2½”). This board comes from the center of the trunk so the annual rings are pretty upright. (I attached a sketch of the board to this topic.)
Now I wonder how I should cut my wood pieces from this board. Many of these pieces have the dimensions of 50mm × 19mm (2″ × ¾”) and are meant to be parts of door frames or carcase frames. There are basically two variants: cutting the pieces parallel (A) or across (B) the annual rings.
Thanks for any advice or shared experience.
David
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You must be logged in to view attached files.19 May 2019 at 3:12 pm #572037Most people find the prominent ray flecking on the quarter sawn beech faces dry attractive, so if you can orient your work to show that you’ll ha e a stunning piecthe one exception is if t o or more faces will be prominent as with a table leg. The. I’d orient the rings at 45° to the faces so all the faces look more or less the same.
19 May 2019 at 9:30 pm #572481Splitting as in A will generate a tangentially cut face (please see photo), while the B version creates a radial face.
A is perhaps more interesting, but B retains the “quarter sawn” properties of the wood, which limits the impact of changes in humidity.
Photos show American Beech (Fagus Grandifolia) – a favourite with me.
- This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by Sven-Olof Jansson. Reason: Typo
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You must be logged in to view attached files.20 May 2019 at 7:45 pm #573534The problems with difficult grain should be smaller with pieces cut according to B, where issues hopefully will end up on the narrow edge and not on the wide face.
The attached photo shows rising grain aalong the edge of a piece of white oak (cut A). When using a bench plane, the face above has to be worked from left to right.
It’s just a notion, but the consequences of any tension I imagine would be smaller going with the B-cut.
All in all, planing should be less tough with the B cut. Beech can be a bit…
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