Quartersawn oak question...

[scsmith42]

Joel Eisner and I have been kicking a question around, and figured that we'd kick it "upstairs" so to speak to the broad FF membership for advice.

The question concerns cutting some medium (about 12" - 16" diameter) white oak logs for a customer.  The customer is interested in quartersawn wood; Joel is questioning if it will be worthwhile to cut as we'd only end up with 4" - 6" wide quartersawn boards, after removing the pith and sapwood.

What we're wondering about though is what if we took the center crosssection of the log, cut it as a slab, and later resawed the slab to product quartersawn veneer?  Would the pith still need to be removed, or in veneer form would it be ok to leave the pith in the finished product?

Comments?  Thanks.  Scott and Joel.

[Norm]

Yes you will still need to remove the pith area in your boards. When I have a smaller white oak to q-saw what I do is slab off the 4 sides keeping the heart crack aligned. I take the cant with the heart crack aligned to the blade and saw two or three slabs out of the center. I take the two leftover halves and stand them on end and through saw them. I then take the slabs from the center and saw the heart off the edge. I've found they dry better this way then leaving it in and sawing it out after dried.

[beenthere]

Wonderin out loud here. If the customer wants boards, what good will veneer do him? 

As Norm says, the pith will need to be removed, but narrow boards shouldn't be a problem as they can be edge glued to make any width needed. Just as it seems to me, anyway. 

[metalspinner]

Why do you want to remove the sap?  The rey fleck is visable in the sap, too.

[LT40HDD51]

By quarter-sawn, were talking about vertical grain in the board, right?

I'm not real familiar with sawin with a swingblade, but couldn't you just straight saw it and get a lot of vertical grain pieces out of it? Of course you need a market for the non-vertical grain stuff... Usually nice and clear from the outside of the log...

With a bandsaw and edger I'll just live-saw it all (right down to half-way, flip 180, saw to bottom) and feed it through the edger. The wide pieces from the middle will be cut twice by the edgerman to get hid of the strip up the middle. Every board won't be vertical grain, but you don't have to quarter every log. You still get narrow boards, but not much you can do there...

[oakiemac]

The size logs you are talking about are really marginal for q sawing IMO. But if you have to qs them then the pith will definately have to be removed from the boards. If not then they will split and warp. I have qs logs 12-15" but the board end up being only about 3-6" wide. If your customer can live with narrow boards then it should be no problem.

[scsmith42]

All - thanks much for the info.

Oakiemac - Joel's in your camp - wants to flat saw the boards.  I just like Q-sawn!

We will chat further with the customer, and probably end up flat sawing them all.

Take care.

Scott

[Ianab]

Remember too that if you get 1/2 way through a log and there are a couple of nice qsawn boards just sitting there on top of the log it's easy enough to saw them out.  ;)

Cheers

Ian

[Robert Long]

Ianab

Not much there for QSing, but if you must ....remove the pith and leave as much sap wood as possible, this will add aditional width to the board and the owner can trim as he sees fit, you must be prepared to have some waine edge on some of them.

Robert