Thread: Quartersawn timber movement

Originally Posted by IanW

Graeme, logs were sawn to perfect quarter-sawn patterns - it can be done easily on a "radial" mill that holds the log or flitch and rotates it to the desired position after each pass. This was the more efficient way of getting classic tapered weatherboards, for e.g., though they were also cut from flat boards by re-sawing diagonally.

Thanks, Ian, I have seen weather boards cut that way but not backsawn boards. Intuitively it seems to involve a lot more work (ie $$$'s) to convert "cheese wedge" shapes into parallel sided boards.

Saw a demo on "colonial farming" in the 60's where a small log (~400mm diameter) was progressively split with axes and wedges into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths and 32nds. Some were then trimmed for fence rails, others were adzed to make barn cladding. In retrospect they were quartersawn.

It depended on the sophistication of the mill - the better your set-up, the better your yield, though the actual yield depends even more on the skill & experienced eye of the sawyer and the quality of the log being sawn. Good benchmen were the key to profitable milling....
Cheers,

Absolutely agree. The highest paid guys in our mills were the saw doctor, the breakdaown sawyer and the timber grader. The graders main job was to teach everyone on the line to grade throughput.

If we decide dot do this then the way we quarter saw our stuff at the three loppers yard is what I call "lazy boys" quarter sawing. We just slab the logs and pick out the middle 4 or so slabs which are then cut longitudinally down the middle. Sometimes we cut the heartwood off these pieces but not all that often. If you have logs coming out of your ears (which we do) then it doesn't matter if we waste about half the log - well we don't really waste it - the flat sun stuff gets used for nature playground timber. We have done this to maybe less than a dozen logs

Originally Posted by BobL

If we decide dot do this then the way we quarter saw our stuff at the three loppers yard is what I call "lazy boys" quarter sawing. We just slab the logs and pick out the middle 4 or so slabs ...

Commercially, this used to be known as "grading for quartersawn". As the timber was being graded:

• Quartersawn went in one pile,
• Select in another pile,
• Prime in the next pile,
• and so on.

Article as promised...
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