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Grain orientation?


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Got another wood grain question. I bought a 3/4" plank of Padouk/Padauk/Paduak, however the hell you spell it and it looks to be true quartersawn. Didn't realize until I got it home. I want to use it as thin (.125 - .250) laminates between some hard maple. The rest of my wood is flatsawn and I'm turning in 90°, so what do I do with the Padouk? Should I cut strips and stack and glue them and then cut my slices, or should I just take the piece back and look for something more flatsawn? Or... will I be OK just ignoring it and treating it like the rest of my wood and turn it 90°? :D

just use what you have.

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I know this dicussion is over more or less but I want to give my two pennies, although they might not be worth much now being that my dollar isn't very strong right now! I hope someone gets that!

Anyways heres my idea, if you take your drawing of a cross sectioned tree, so it looks like a bunch of circle inside each other progressivly getting smaller, then draw your piece for the quarter sawn cut, then draw your piece of flatsawn cut (now here's the important part) overlapping the quartersawn piece, so the it looks like either a upside down T or a +. In doing this you will see like WES said that the piece that is overlapped is part of both, so in one direction it flatsawn, and flipped 90 degrees it's quarter sawn. If it's a 1 by 4 quarter sawn, the 4 is the quarter sawn face and the 1 is flatsawn face, it may be a small face but it is still a flatsawn face. There is no other way it could be anything else.

i am talking about perfectly flatsawn and perfectly quartersawn

Like Wes stated we are guitar builders, we don't pickup crap pieces of wood off the edge of a tree, we are talking about choice pieces of wood. If you want your guitar to look good and be strong or sturdy(same difference)then you want perfect pieces. Which is not that hard to do. You don't need to worry about small angled wedges from the edge of a tree, if you build guitars, you shouldn't even take this argument into consideration, being that you should never even bother looking at them. They will bring you nothing but problems with twisting, warping, and will look terrible with no grain definition. You got to think, trees are F'*in big, a piece like a neck blank can have a damn near perfect straight grain, even one piece sized body blanks and bigger can. So when your at the store look through the wood, and you'll see a lot of it is going to be near perfect, and those pieces have a quarter sawn edge and a flatsawn edge. Whether it be a 1 inch face or a 1 foot face.

People like Wes have a lot of knowledge behind them, and not just personal knowledge, but also all the knowledge and experiences of so many luthiers and professional builders, so disagreeing with him is like disagreeing with hundreds of people with countless lifetimes of experience. If you disagree with him, you better have some solid stone cold facts to back it up.

So that is my two cents. It seems pretty black and white to me. I hope my diagram instructions make sense. Jason

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