There is a bank here in our small town of Decatur, MI that was established in 1871. It has all the original wood work wich is all quarter sawn white oak veneer. It is beautiful paneling that covers the doors, and teller booths and some of the furniture. What amazes me though is the size of the ray fleck. I bet some of the rays are 3" in width or even wider.
When I quarter saw white oak I can get some large ones but they usually are no wider then 1" at the biggest. I guess my question is, are these large rays the result of old slow growth white Oak or does it have some thing to do with the way the veneer was cut? I would love to cut boards with rays that large but I have never seen it. I just cut a huge 36" dbh log that had real tight growth rings and the quarter sawn boards are covered with good fleck but nothing real wide.
when you say "wide" what do you mean? are you measuring along the grain or against it?
white oak has much longer flecks than red oak.
If the rays run from one edge of the board to the other, then the width is, as I'm calling it, is measured along the length of the board or with the grain.
are you sawing parallel to the bark, or parallel to the pith? It could be a runout thing. I don't saw much white oak, I haven't experimented.
Look to bur oak for that wide fleck. I take a close look at the end grain before sawing and can tell before the log ever hits the carriage as to what I'm going to get. The thicker the ray, the better.
Older growth would have bigger rays and you can see that the rays are bigger as you go from pith to the outside. Bur oak grows quite slow so a big tree would likely have a lot of big rays toward the bark. In what is called a multiseriate ray (many rows of cells) they can fuse forming larger rays or divide forming new ones. Storied rays (tiered rays in echelon fashion) give you the ripple mark figure tangentially (quartered surface).
By volume, white oak Q. alba has 28 % rays, and bur oak has 20%. Q. velutina has 31%. This tabulated info is taken from a MS thesis by G. E. French, New York State College of Forestry, 1923.
Information from "Textbook of Wood Technology".
I have not come across a comparison of ray sizes by species. But, rays are biggest in the white oaks, can be over 2" tall along the grain.
Fused rays together might explain the wide widths. I have never sawn burr oak so maybe that is the species. Whatever it is, I love the look of those huge rays.
Thanks for all the info.