In a post in the last week or two someone mentioned radial sawing. Can anyone explain?
I read about siding that was sawn on a mill that mounted the log like a lathe and ripped a kerf in it and then rotated the log a degree or two and ripped it again, producing a piece of "feather edge" siding. My recollection is the mills were short, maybe six or eight feet. This produced perfectly quartersawn pieces and minimal waste. Anybody know more about this?
When I was building I installed a lot of feather edged siding. Those pieces were produced by resawing boards at an angle. Usually Western Red Cedar. A local builders supply would actually resaw yellow pine 2 x 8's on demand. You could install the pieces with the smooth face out of the sawed face showing.
For years I have been wondering about the radial sawing and thinking it would be ideal for species like sycamore and even the poplar Bill showed below.
Years ago, I saw a picture of an antique radial clapboard saw mill. The saw was over head. The log held between centers & shuttled and then was ripped down to a core, indexed a few degrees, then sawn again until the entire log had been sawn. How they got the boards off the core, I don't know.
What you ended up with is the entire log quarter sawn into siding, which would be very resistant to cupping, like plain sawn wood would.
A quick internet search showed a couple places to get radially sawn siding, but no pictures were posted.
There used to be a stave mill in Prince George near here. The saw was like a hole saw on steroids. I sold them some White oak logs and got to watch for a while. The saw would plunge in and cut a "board" that was cupped to match the shape of the saw and the eventual barrel. They had a second saw that cleaned up the edges. They stacked them on pallets, criss crossed. They sent them off to be finished and made into barrels. The death of the place was one of the workers cut his hand off.
>>>...rotated the log ... produced perfectly quartersawn pieces and minimal waste. Anybody know more about this?
The definition of quartersawing varies depending on who you are talking to and the degree of imperfection of the quartersawn board, usually based on economics and the reality of sawing. The best methods radial are the most time consuming and wastetful, not minimal waste.
For example, the cover and figure 3A in this document shows three methods of quartersawing. The two at the bottom are radially perfectly quarter sawn with lots of waste, unless you also want some wedges. The two methods at the top are sawn differently with a relaxed definition of quartersawn towards the outside of on the upper left and towards the inside on the upper right.
The radial method shown in the bottom half of the log give perfectly quartersawn boards at great waste and more expense/effort.
Almost all of the industry quarter saws with a compromise and changes the definition of what is the acceptable angle of the rings to the sides of the board.
Note that even when flat/plane sawing if you simply saw a board down the center and containing the pith you always get two narrower but perfectly quartersawn boards. The next two boards on either side of the pith are wider and are almost perfectly quartersawn in a large diameter log. The further you get from the pith the greater the angle and less you can get away with calling it quartersawn.
Slicing up quarters various ways gives some perfectly quartersawn boards and some progressively less so.
several years ago (well, probably at least 10 now) I went to hearne looking for QS beech. They let me know that beech doesn't have much value to most and they didn't stock it (except in full through and through cut trees maybe somewhere outside).
When I went to their racks for QS cherry (which was an OK alternative for some detail planes) I did end up buying some, but almost all of it was somewhat off of quartered. I was confused back then why none or almost none of it was dead quartered, but have learned since - as your document shows - that most mills do it really as a range and set a limit.
I've also learned that if quartersawn wood that is dead QS is sawn off center, the wood still twists
The circular mills probably do nearly all of their work in the plain sawn pattern because it gets the most money from buyers who usually don't care about QS or not. There are a few people here who saw trees through and through, but I wish you could get wood sawn like that without the premium that everyone wants to charge. I'd gladly take the whole tree sawn through so that I'd have a variety of grain orientation but most of the decent wood here sawn like that is twice per board foot vs. sorted cherry. There must be a secret that I don't know about it. Maybe it takes a pretty log to sell things that way and most of the really pretty stuff goes for veneer.
